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HAIL, COLUMBIA! 



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Books by W. L. GEORGE 

Haily Columbia! 

Caliban 

Woman and Tomorrow 

Until the Day Break 

The Strangers' Wedding 

The Second Blooming 

Little Beloved 

The Intelligence of Woman 

The Individualist 

The City of Light 

A Bed of Roses 

Blind Alley 




HOLIDAY-MAKERS IN A NEW ENGLAND VILLAGE 



HAIL 
COLUMBIA! 

RANDOM IMPRESSIONS OF A 
CONSERVATIVE ENGLISH RADICAL 

BY 
W. L. GEORGE 



ILLUSTRATED BY 

GEORGE WRIGHT 




HARPER &^ BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

MCMXXI 



ry 



Hail Columbia I 



Copyright, 1921. by Harper & Brothers 
Printed in the United States of America 
F-v 



JUN 23 1921 
ICI.A614877 



Dedicated in Friendship 

to 
Sir Lionel Phillips, Bart. 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

Preface vii 

I. In Old America i 

II. America In the Making 37 

III. The American Scene 73 

IV. The American Woman 115 

_V. Megapolis Southward 153 

VI. Parthian Shots 195 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

Holiday-makers in a New England Village . . Frontispiece 

At That Auction I Met Uncle Sam Facing p. lo 

One Has the Impression of Aloof Aristocracy in 

What Remains of Old Boston " 14 

Charming, Courtly, and Cultured, These Aristo- 
crats Seem to Be Only Shadows " 18 

The Grain Elevators Are Like Turreted Castles, 

Spectral White " 52 

The Appeal of the Circus Is Perennial Through- 
out the Land " 62 

Wealth Gushes from the Ground in Torrents " 70 
The National Restlessness Makes for a Gayety 

and Charm of Its Own " 108 



PREFACE 

When a stranger, visiting a foreign country, devotes 
to his journey less than six months, and when he then 
writes a book upon that country, he feels inclined to 
apologize to its citizens. It is not that he doubts his 
own ability to understand what he has seen, nor that 
he is uncertain in the judgments which arise there- 
from; if he has for himself the respect that a respect- 
able man deserves, he must believe that he has written 
a worthy book. Only, after a short visit, he must tell 
himself that a great deal must have escaped him. I, 
who visited a considerable portion of the United 
States, cannot help thinking: "You went from Maine 
to Nebraska, from New York to Georgia, from Georgia 
to Texas, Kansas, Illinois. You know something of 
Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Indiana . . . but what of 
Wyoming and Colorado? and you didn't stay long in 
Virginia. And Seattle looks awfully exciting on the 
map." That's the trouble. One wonders whether 
one's opinions would not have been varied by more 
extended experience. One feels presumptuous; one 
tells oneself that one cannot condense within those few 
months the necessary experience, and especially the 
necessary repose, which would make it possible to ar- 
rive at balanced judgments. 

That is not quite my state of mind as I lay these 
chapters before the American public. I quite realize 
that portions of my journeys have been purely geo- 
graphic; that I have not had all the contact I should 



viii PREFACE 

have needed with representative American families, 
for truly representative families generally keep them- 
selves rather to themselves. I know that my vision of 
the social life must be that of a guest entertained rather 
specially, with great profusion, with immense cor- 
diality, and that this does not quite indicate the or- 
dinary social hfe of the Americans. Especially, I 
realize that I have not lived inside the family, that I 
have not witnessed the quarrels at breakfast, the young 
man's moods of depression, nor heard him proclaim in 
the home circle his ambitions and ideals. I have not 
been on the inside, but I have been as near to it as I 
could, nearer, I hope, than most visiting Enghshmen, 
because I wanted to. 

That is the main point. I came to America interested 
only in subsidiary fashion in scenery, business, and 
politics; I had to take notice of these, but primarily I 
came over to meet the Americans, to try to understand 
them, and to take on the easy task of liking them. I 
did not expect within those months to acquire a perfect 
understanding of America, for I have lived a middHng 
long life without gaining a complete understanding of 
my own countrymen. But at least I did begin sym- 
pathetically, and so I beg my readers to believe that 
my inevitable errors are due to enthusi'asm as much as 
to ignorance. Also, I cannot overstress the fact that 
nowhere do I venture to lay down conclusions; to do 
that would be impertinent; all I have attempted is a 
book of impressions. I have done my best to see things 
as they are, and to determine their origins, but I had 
no means of tracing the obscurer impulses in the Ameri- 
can temperament; it would have taken me twenty 
years even to guess at them. So these are only im- 
pressions, and they should be taken as such, as the 
work of a very well-disposed, interested stranger, who 



PREFACE ix 

hopes that he is intelligent and knows that he is 
friendly. 

That point of friendliness must not be overlooked. 
Historic rivalry and divergences in social habits have 
often led Englishmen to cross the Atlantic ready to 
carp, and I suppose I may say that many Americans 
have visited England in the same spirit. The result 
has not only proved superficial, but also adverse to 
international amity. If a man visits a foreign country, 
he is not going to judge it fairly unless he makes up his 
mind to view it at least neutrally. For my part, I went 
over with a biased mind; I was biased in favor of 
America. This was not only due to my having been 
brought up in Paris, where the American girl and the 
American dollar are very popular; nor was it entirely 
due to the kindness with which my writings had been 
received in the States. My bias in favor of America 
arose from an intellectual process. Long before sailing 
I had told myself: "If within a century a new country 
has reached a population of over a hundred millions; 
if it has created as many universities as England owns 
secondary schools; if it has produced Whitman, Edi- 
son, Lincoln, Robert Lee, Grant, Whistler, Henry 
James; if it has grown strong enough to compel the 
greedy imperiahsm of Europe to take its hands off the 
American continent — if it has done all that, that coun- 
try must hold some greatness." On these lines I was 
entitled to assume the greatness of America, and I 
needed only to discover it. How far I have been able 
to discover it the following chapters will show. 

In this quest I have, so far as possible, avoided gen- 
eralizations. Generalizations are the devil, and yet 
one cannot quite do without them, so I have tried to 
attenuate them, to qualify |^them. That is not merely a 
trick; I ask the reader to remember that all my quali- 



X PREFACE 

fications are essential to my process of thought. My 
whole attitude to facts is: first, to be sure of them; 
secondly, to check them; thirdly, to have them checked 
by somebody else, and, when they are established, to 
doubt them. Notably, I have tried not to generalize 
in the comparative way which is so common in books of 
travel. One does it almost unconsciously. One wants 
to say, "Americans drink ice water, whereas the Eng- 
lish. . . ." This seems to me bad observation. The 
thing to record is that the Americans drink ice water. 
Who cares whether the English prefer sack or Malmsey? 
I have tried to take the Americans as I found them, 
as they were, instead of forcing their reluctant shapes 
into the EngUsh standard mold. Who are the British, 
after all, that they should be taken as the human 
standard .f* 

Not to generalize, not to compare, and to accept 
things as they impress me — that seems to me the best 
way of gaining of America a picture not entirely dis- 
torted. Also, I did a little prehminary work, which the 
visiting Englishman should undoubtedly subject him- 
self to! I read a fairly fat book on American history 
before I landed in the country. And I extracted for 
memorizing the principal points. I do not pretend that 
after this I could have matriculated at Princeton, but 
I did obtain some idea of who was Alexander Hamilton, 
of the fact that separatism, which broke out in the 
Civil War, already existed in 1787; I was able to realize 
the difference of impulse in industrial New England and 
agricultural Louisiana, and so forth. Historical method 
has its dangers, for it tends to make one think that his- 
tory repeats itself. Which is nonsense. When history 
repeats itself, it generally stutters. 

Lastly, I have tried to pursue truth, even though 
since Pilate we have not progressed very far in knowing 



PREFACE xi 

what it is. I have done my best with the fugitive ap- 
pearances which masquerade as verity in a fluctuating 
world. That is the best one can hope to do, and, at 
least, it is the best man can do for his own self-respect. 
To blame freely, that is easy enough; to praise with 
abundance, that is perhaps more difficult. For praise 
of the foreigner, except for those who think their own 
country always in the wrong, demands of one a slight 
imaginative leap. One has to throw aside old preju- 
dices and habits, to see things with eyes renewed, eyes 
almost virginal. One can't quite do it, for the pictures 
accumulated during one's life haunt one's retina. One 
can't be born again so easily as that. But one can try; 
one can conscientiously and continually try. In such 
a book as this, one may do so with profit and certainly 
without tremor. A country such as America, so im- 
mensely vital, so rich, so ambitious, has less than any 
in the world a right or a reason to fear the truth. 



HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

Random Impressions of a Conservative 
English Radical 



IN OLD AMERICA 

I BEGIN at Nashua. At Nashua incipit vita 
nova. This is not so paradoxic as the sight 
of the painted wooden cottages of the httle New 
Hampshire town might suggest; at least I hope 
that these lines may reveal my impression that in 
America new life begins everywhere. It is not my 
fault that I am in Nashua; even before I left 
England my American friends were receiving with 
the sympathy due to lunatics the assertion that I 
intended to visit neither Yellowstone Park, nor 
the Grand Caiion, nor Niagara, and that neither 
wild horses nor tame railroads would drag me up 
the Lehigh Valley. *'But," they persist even 
now, "you'll go to the Rockies. You mustn't miss 
the Rockies. Oh, do go to the Rockies!" until I 
wonder whether their adjuration to go to the 



2 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

Rockies does not conceal a desire to rid New 
England of my presence. 

You will ask: **Why this aversion from the 
natural beauties of America ? Is there no poetry 
in your soul?" To which I answer: "I feel no 
hatred for the rolling Mississippi, but what I have 
come to see is not American territory, but American 
men and women, not crags or cathedrals, except 
in so far as they have determined the development 
of the American citizen. Not monuments, but 
men, is my simple motto, whose simplicity con- 
ceals almost unapproachable ambition. I want to 
understand the American, to discover the dominant 
traits of a hundred and ten million people, number- 
ing a dozen races, speaking eighty languages, living 
under climates which here bring ten feet of snow, 
there nurture the palm tree and the cotton plant. 

That is a pretty enterprise, and you will justly 
say that these Britishers must be rather sure of 
themselves to come over for six months on such 
an errand. To which I will plead guilty, and seek 
extenuation in the fact that many of my country- 
men have given not six months, but six weeks, 
and that the results of such haste have been bad 
from the point of view of international relations. 
When a misunderstanding arises between a man and 
a woman it often leads to marriage and happiness; 
between nations, however, it favors threats of war. 



IN OLD AMERICA 3 

So my task is not to describe features and places, 
which my readers know better than I do and almost 
as well as the authors of the guidebooks, but to 
proceed like this: There are a dozen Americas — 
within the Federal boundary lies British Massa- 
chusetts, where live Americans; Spanish New 
Mexico and California, where live Americans; 
Teutonic, Slavic, and Scandinavian Middle West, 
where live Americans. The son of the Polish Jew 
on First Avenue is an American; the son of the 
Alabama negro is an American. The son of the 
Pilgrims at Cape Cod is an American. My desire 
is to find out what unites these varied people, what 
keeps them together where no man pursueth, what 
views are held on one ocean, yet not denied on the 
other. Briefly, I want to effect a synthesis of the 
American mentality; to arrive at such a clarity 
as will enable me to say, *'This is an American 
idea" with as much assurance as I now say, 
"This is an English idea." Now, this cannot be 
done by coursing between railway stations. A 
man's knowledge is not measured by the miles 
he travels. In this case I feel that all I can do is 
to select a few patches of America — viz.. New 
England, New York, Chicago, a farm in Kansas, 
a fruit ranch in California, an oil well in Oklahoma, 
a Pennsylvania mansion, and to cancel those traits 
which do not appear in all of them. The tend- 



4 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

encies, the ideas which recur everywhere will 
indicate (as nearly as human vanity can tolerate 
truth) the main lines of the American cosmos. 
Briefly, I want to co-ordinate impressions, and 
then to suggest that these co-ordinations make up 
the picture. That is why I stand in Nashua, 
interested in two old Colonial houses whose shal- 
low verandas rest on slender pillars; I cannot see 
through the prudent lace of the curtains, and yet 
I must learn to see, if ever I am to understand this 
American people, of which I can say already that 
it finds no rival to its charm, except its strangeness. 
As I came up the road into Nashua from the 
station lower on the line I had an instance of 
strangeness: I found a man lying on the grass 
under a tree. He was neither smoking nor sleeping 
nor reading. He merely lay under a tree, pre- 
sumably thinking. You will gauge the effect upon 
me of the three days in New York and the four 
in New England which prefaced this incident 
when I tell you that I found it amazing that an 
American should lie under a tree doing nothing. 
I had been going about for a week, and while in 
England you will everywhere behold people doing 
nothing (and doing it with great intensity), in 
America this sad spectacle is very rare. For a 
moment I wondered if the man were dead. That 
would be one explanation. Or he might be Eng- 



IN OLD AMERICA 5 

lish, which would be another explanation. But 
he hailed me to ask the time in a language that 
is fast growing familiar. No, the idle man was 
American. There is no explanation; so I enter 
him here as the exception which proves the rule 
that Americans are always active because they 
are invariably vital. 

Few Americans conceive the effect of their vital- 
ity upon the English writer who meditated in 
Nashua. At first America was awful. It was like 
being posted. I was bagged by the pier officials, 
stamped by the customs, sorted by porters, re- 
bagged by a taxi, restamped by the reception 
clerk, and at incredible speed delivered into a bed- 
room through something that looked like a mine 
shaft. And the Elevated roared, the locomotives 
rang their bells, the trolley cars and the omnibuses 
rang something else. And when I tried to be 
funny because my room number was 192 1, and 
(forgetting the date) said, "That's handy to re- 
member; same number as the year,'* the porter 
reproved me with: "No, not this year. Next 
year." Even my bedroom was a year ahead of 
the period ! I realized that I really was in America. 

It isn't so bad as that in Nashua, even though 
it possesses factories. But even here there is 
activity — things are made, dispatched; their own- 
ers telephone; women think of careers; young 



6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

men buy automobiles; and people walk with deci- 
sion, as if they were busier in Nashua than we in 
London town. I am smitten by the restlessness, 
the enthusiasm, the passion for improvisation of 
this amazing America; I realize, vaguely, all sorts 
of new qualities that contradict one another — 
warm heart and cool mind, audacity and prudence, 
organization and makeshift. I feel an America so 
ruthless that she will strip me of my shirt, an 
America so kindly that she will give me a better 
shirt than I could buy. As if among the nations 
she were Robin Hood. 

I do not suppose that the pie belt would be 
recommended to me as the best place in which to 
study America, except from the historical point of 
view. But recommendations never worry very 
much a writer who acquires his facts as the wolf 
gets his salt — viz., through the circulatory system 
of his captures. And history has its value as an hors- 
d^oeuvre before the more important dish of one's 
own period. I began with New England so as to 
resist the overwhelming pull of New York, and I 
began badly, on the following lines of Whittier: 

Oh! may never a son of thine, 
Where'er his wandering steps incline, 
Forget the sky which bent above 
His childhood, like a dream of love, 
Or hear unmoved the taunt of scorn 
Breathed o'er the brave New England born. 



IN OLD AMERICA 7 

As I dislike poetry — which impresses me as the 
coward's escape from the difficulties of prose, 
through the back door of melody — I cannot say 
whether this is one of the couplets that should 
never have been rhymed, but I objected to its 
rhapsodic air. Also, several New-Englanders at 
once assured me that their childhood was not over- 
hung by a dream of love. But, though they were 
all sober people, who evoked the gentler side of 
their Scottish temperament, they did set up for 
me another picture, which I venture to call "The 
Hypnosis of History," of "The Legend of New 
England.'* Subsequently a few New-Yorkers and 
Westerners showed that they had accepted the 
legend. 

You may ask what I mean by the "hypnosis" 
of history. One might answer in a sentence that 
the educated American is infinitely more conscious 
of his national origin than is the denizen of any 
other part of the world. The past of his country 
acts as the shadow of his present and the danger 
signal of his future. For instance, where an 
American can trace back his pedigree several gen- 
erations, he will almost invariably reveal the fact 
to his English guest — exhibit the crest on his signet 
ring, the arms on a piece of old plate, and dilate 
a little sentimentally on the virtues and sufferings 
of his forebears. One strand in the psychology of 



8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

this impulse is undoubtedly to make the English 
visitor feel at home among heirs of an identical 
tradition; the other, and more important strand, 
is the romantic reverence the American feels for 
the pioneers. America knows three main sources 
of romance — love, business, and the pioneer. 

Thus, the American gives relief to traditions that 
his English cousin assumes or to which he is indif- 
ferent until they are attacked; in the matter of 
descent he is not cynical, and seldom holds the 
French point of view — that it may be as well if one 
doesn't know one's great-grandfathers, as one of the 
four would be bound to be disreputable. Indeed, 
the pedigreed American, call himself a democrat 
if he likes, knows and cares much more about the 
ancient local families than does the Englishman. 
As a rule, he knows his local history; he entreats 
you not to miss Emerson's house at Concord, 
describes the contents of the Salem East India 
Museum, and knows the casualties at the Lexing- 
ton riot. Almost invariably he forgets the South, 
and seldom has a memory for the pioneers who 
were wiped out at Jamestown; the Mayflower and 
its cargo of prayer books and plowshares serve him 
as the mythology that all men must create who 
would capture illusion. 

It is mythology! I listen, and all about me in 
the hotel youthful Americans, big sophomores and 



IN OLD AMERICA 9 

boyish plebes, fluffy girls and young matrons, play 
golf, tennis, croquet; ride, bathe, paddle canoes, 
dance, drive automobiles, airplanes; but also de- 
clare that So-and-so is on the pig's back, while 
Millicent knows how to hand out the dope. I 
Hsten to the friend who describes the record where 
it is stated that John Robinson . . . and wonder 
what it is preserves the capacity to nurture the 
belief that New England still exists. New England 
does not seem to me to exist, save in the shape of 
a Newer England that the romantics do not per- 
ceive. 

It was in Salem that I asked myself what it was 
supported the legend of New England; what 
mosses held together the roof of the old manse. 
This does not mean that I project an attack on 
New England, but it must be recalled that an 
Englishman cannot be as much impressed by Old 
America as by New America. The thing America 
has to be proud of is not its past, but its present, 
and I wish that I could whole-heartedly say that 
this applies to England too. Still, it seems that 
America does not hold this view, and that she is 
still attached to the idea of old Puritan New 
England. Even in Chicago, even in half-Indian 
corners of Oklahoma, I find reverence for New Eng- 
land. And when I consider Chicago, for instance, I 
am amazed that anything of this reverence should 



10 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

survive. I suspect that the moss which holds to- 
gether the old manse is of two kinds. One is 
architectural. 

The city-bred American, living on the eighteenth 
floor most of the day, naturally feels a romantic 
attraction for the wooden cottages that lie between 
New York and Maine. It is charming architecture 
this cottage architecture of wooden slats painted 
white, or gray, or green, or even yellow; the 
verandas supported upon fluted pillars, the little 
Doric pediments and cornices, the fanlights over 
the paneled doors. All this is intimate; and when 
such a village is grouped around a wooden church 
which in miniature recalls the designs of Sir Chris- 
topher Wren, one understands the attraction of 
what I venture to call an emotional picture post- 
card. And of the more massive houses (such as 
those of Newport, New Hampshire), and many 
that you find in Salem and Concord, comfortable, 
boxlike edifices of brick, with a palladian magnifi- 
cence of column and a cool purity of Colonial style, 
all this is rather more England than New Eng- 
land, and so it is wonderful that it should help to 
create illusion. 

The second support of the legend of New Eng- 
land is, I suppose, found in the remains of the 
New England characte-. This character has, I 
hope, not been defined by Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, 




AT THAT AUCTION I MET UNCLE SAM 



IN OLD AMERICA ii 

who says that, after being drained of vital hfe 
into the West, the New England character "passed 
into the condition of neurotic anaemia in which it 
has remained so largely to this day." I cannot rival 
Mr. Brooks in information, but I will venture to 
confront him in impression. So far as there is a 
New England character it suggests to me a rather 
Scottish type: there is in the speech and attitude 
of the New England farmer an air of moderation 
and reserve, tinged with a little suspicion, and in- 
formed with a certain kindness. 

I stayed some time in a New England village 
and all did whatever I wanted them to do, 
but invariably after saying that they were not 
quite sure it could be done. It was a silent 
place, whose social life was concentrated round 
the drug store, to which young men and women 
seemed to escape for mild giddiness suitable to 
their age. But, in the main, there was no gid- 
diness. There was a suggestion that here were 
people still holding on hard to some land they 
had conquered with difficulty. Many tales were 
told of a local character whom I will call Hiram 
Jebbison, who, in the view of the village, was the 
real New-Englander. Hiram was a wonderful man. 
One day he sold a local landowner some buff^aloes 
for his park. The beasts went sick, and, very 
kindly, Hiram offered to take them back. He 



12 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

said he would isolate them on a Httle island in a 
lake, which belonged to him. "Of course," added 
Hiram, "you will let your men build a little bridge 
to the island for me to get them over." The land- 
owner agreed. Hiram then took twenty of the 
landowner's men, tons of his lumber, and built 
a bridge. When that was done he told the land- 
owner that of course the buffaloes would want 
shelter. The landowner agreed. So Hiram took 
more of the landowner's men and more tons of 
his lumber to build a shanty on the island. When 
the buffaloes felt better, Hiram sold them to some- 
body else; then he sold the island, the bridge, and 
the shanty, which had cost him nothing at all. 

That might be a Scotch story. Another tale 
of Hiram is Scotch too: A raw sportsman from 
New York engaged Hiram to go hunting elk. 
An elk was shot, and the amateur, pretending to 
know all about it, demanded the leg. Hiram said 
not a word, gave him the leg and kept the valuable 
part, the loin. When the sportsman complained 
that he had been unable to get a knife into his 
choice, Hiram merely replied, "I could have told 
you that"; but he had said nothing, for Hiram 
Jebbison never said anything unnecessary. 

I suspect that these traits and the stories they 
give rise to help to sustain the legend of New 
England. A visit to a remote village enhances the 



IN OLD AMERICA 13 

legend. There was an auction in our village, one 
morning, where the auctioneer began by putting 
up a red flag marked with his name. Then a 
small boy went round the village, languidly beat- 
ing a small drum to announce that something was 
going to happen. Nothing much happened, for the 
sale was of old furniture, spare parts, and rusty 
nails. But two things were interesting. In spite 
of the gabble of the auctioneer, ^Tve fifty, give 
me sixty — I've only the fifty, give me fifty-five,'* 
etc., no bid of one dollar was ever made, even for 
articles which ended at ten. The cautious New- 
Englander always started at fifty cents, and no- 
body ever raised more than a nickel. The other 
fact was that, to my amazement, at that auction 
I met Uncle Sam. I thought he was dead; that 
he had been replaced by the new American, short 
and sturdy, Inclined to stoutness, with a round or 
square head, and rather large eyes. But Uncle 
Sam still lives In New England with a long, tanned, 
hard face, a bony nose and a goatee. With him 
came Colonel Cody, with his ferocious little eye 
and his leg-of-mutton beard. Figures of legend! 
And they maintain the legend in the mind — they 
will not maintain It long. For New England Is 
dead. It Is being slain by Newer England, by an 
industrial New England which knows nothing of 
the Pilgrim. In those states you will find factories 



14 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

that are twenty to thirty years old; you will find 
new industries. Not only in Connecticut, at 
Bridgeport, for instance, do you find them making 
the gramophone, or building engines, but at all 
sorts of places inland, at Nashua, at Lowell, even 
about the sacred precincts of Concord and Salem. 
A visit to Salem must be a tragedy for the senti- 
mentalist. You go along Andover Street, or Fed- 
eral Street, or into Washington Square, and look 
at all these houses of gentlefolk, their pleasant col- 
onnades; you glance at the settees and at the 
Colonial porches, and suddenly you emerge into 
an Industrial town with trolley cars, tenements, 
and smokestacks. A crude sign by the railway 
says, "Stop, Look, and Listen.'* One still more 
crude merely says, "Look Out.'* Old Salem did 
not have to look out, and now, to my mind, it Is 
no more. It is no more because the old New- 
Englander, who came from England and Scotland, 
has been completely swamped by the masses of 
foreign population which have followed the fac- 
tories. I met Poles in Vermont, Italians in Con- 
cord; Bridgeport has its Hungarian — its Chinese, 
quarter; the rasping English of the past has given 
place to the lisping languages of the South and 
East. Near the ancient grounds stand the self- 
service restaurants, the automatic bars, and the 
movies. The movies in Salem! 




ONE HAS THE IMPRESSION OF ALOOF ARISTOCRACY IN 
WHAT REMAINS OF OLD BOSTON 



IN OLD AMERICA 15 

I went down to Marblehead, and I saw it on an 
exquisite day, when the sea was cygnet gray, 
spangled with furled sails, and a mauve mist held 
over the islets in the bay. Romance in Herge- 
sheimerland . . . Lovis's Cove, and the landing of 
the British . . . this illuminated spot, what does it 
mean now? I don't think it means anything at 
all. The immigrants have swept it all away. I 
know that the romantic will reply that the immi- 
grants came because sturdy New England had 
established democratic freedom in this corner of the 
world. I doubt it. The Europeans left Europe 
because they were fleeing from something worse 
than tyranny; they were fleeing from poverty; 
indeed, in the 'forties they were fleeing from 
famine, and, later on, from the crowded conditions 
of their own birth rate. So they came to New 
England and went to the West; they went to 
the warmer lands first, and that is why they came 
to America instead of to Canada. It was not free- 
dom, but free land which brought them across 
the Atlantic, and if there had been no Revolution, 
if the United States to-day were a British dominion, 
the immigrants would have come all the same. 

I realize that the rough qualities of New England 
have leavened the whole of America, for already 
I have met their descendants in the Middle West, 
but what a slight leaven it is among these enor- 



i6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mous masses of Scandinavians, Germans, Italians! 
So slight that the New England speech has disap- 
peared in the rest of America, that the lean body 
has been obscured by a sturdy envelope, the cau- 
tious temperament replaced by the temperament 
of the most dashing commercial adventurers the 
world has seen. New England made the beacon 
that lighted America, but it was a beacon made of 
lumber; now modern America feeds the fire with 
kerosene. Nothing remains of the New England 
influence except a vacillating Puritanism, which 
comes up suddenly in the prosecution of a book, in 
a cry against skimpy bathing dresses — a Puritanism 
which leaps up and down like the flame of a dying 
candle. The New England temperament has filled 
its part in the American play; history is not likely 
to cast it again. 

I suppose that the full spirit of New England is 
now to be found in Boston, and there will the last 
ramparts stand when all the nations of the world, 
congregated in the States, come lapping round. 
One has the impression of aloof aristocracy in what 
remains of Old Boston, and the impression is all 
the stronger owing to the invisibility of the in- 
habitants. One can stand in Louisburg Square, and 
not a face appears at the windows. I ate the 
bread of Bostonians, and so may not speak of 
them, but one, a stranger, I may mention and do 



IN OLD AMERICA 17 

not forget. He came out of his house one morning 
and stood upon the steps for a moment, looking 
to the right and left. As he did not seem to know 
where he wanted to go, I felt at once that he 
must be an aristocrat. He was about fifty, well 
groomed, with rather delicate features, and he car- 
ried a small, brown-paper parcel which seemed to 
embarrass him. When he perceived me he flung 
me a look of such dislike that I wondered whether 
he might not be English. And so we stood for a 
moment, I looking at him; after all, a cat can look 
at a Bostonian aristocrat. Then I asked him my 
way, being lost, as usual, and his glance revealed 
a still greater repulsion. He was quite unlike the 
ordinary American I had been meeting, who goes 
out of his way to show you yours, who takes your 
arm, draws plans, almost offers to pay your car fare. 
While he hesitated, I explained that I was a 
stranger in Boston, and a change came over his 
features. "Oh," he said, doubtfully, "are you 
English?" On my saying "Yes" the change grew 
more marked, and I perceived that it was a virtue 
to be EngHsh. We talked a Httle and, as if guided 
by an instinct, I spoke of a recent visit to a Sussex 
town where the grass grows between the cobbles of 
the street. The aristocrat then gave me a smile. 
Following upon a compliment addressed to his 
house, he opened the door and showed me his 



1 8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

hall, which Is paneled In oak and delicately fur- 
nished with old mahogany and ancient china, but 
he did not ask me In, as would have a modern 
American. Instead, he talked guardedly. He 
even advised what I should see In Boston . . . and 
he recommended nothing that did not lie between 
the Massachusetts Hospital and Copley Square; 
there was nothing else. When I told him that I 
was going to the Middle West he seemed tempted 
not to reply. Then, hesitating, "You will find It 
strange." He would not explain any more. He 
did not want to bury the Middle West, but he 
could not praise it. He revealed that he had never 
been west of Ohio, but he had paid visits to Eng- 
land, Italy, and France. His wife, it appeared, 
was an American, born In France. So we ex- 
changed a few remarks on French literature and 
English politics that were not very profound, until, 
as he expanded on his homes beyond the water, 
I had the courage to ask him how he liked living 
in America. I think he was a little shocked; this 
was obviously one of the things one did not dis- 
cuss. He tried to escape me, as would have an 
Englishman, by talking of the neighborhood, of the 
country club, alluding to horses, and praising golf, 
but I persisted in my Investigation until, almost 
churlishly, he replied, "Well, one need only mix 
with the people one likes." And then I understood 




CHARMING, COURTLY, AND CULTURED, THESE ARLSTOCRATS SEEM TO BE 

ONLY SHADOWS 



IN OLD AMERICA 19 

him; I understood his reluctant love for changing 
America. I was able to imagine the life of these 
surviving Anglo-Americans, whose visiting list 
spreads only a mile, excepting cousins at Lexing- 
ton; who still drink tea; who say "Bosston," and 
not "Bawston"; who keep their paneled door tight 
locked, and behind it live persistently in lavender 
and dimity; who have an account with a book- 
seller in Piccadilly; who receive letters edged with 
an inch of black when a French marquis dies; 
whose sons go to Harvard, failing Oxford, and 
marry the daughter of a dean, see their incomes 
shrink, and live on, disdainful and forgotten, under 
the shadow of an academic wall, and are gentle- 
men to the end. 

For, indeed, as I came to understand better the 
great Irish city which hides under the old English 
reputation of Boston, I cannot help feeling, and 
I felt it without undue regret, that the remaining 
representatives of the period of organdie, port 
wine, and square dances are milestones on the 
road which leads back three periods in a country 
where no man and no woman seem to run the 
risk of ever being turned into a pillar of salt. 
Charming, courtly, and cultured, these aristocrats 
seem to be only shadows. They are the end, and 
upon their graves can be inscribed as a parody 
of Kosciuszko the words, "Finis Bostonia!" 



20 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

The legend of New England Is not the only one 
which the traveling Englishman encounters. He 
also has to reckon with what I may call the legend 
of Boston. But there is a difference: the legend 
of New England he discovers only when he reaches 
the American shores; the legend of Boston he 
brings in his own kit bag. It is rather a difficult 
legend to define. More or less, the English idea 
of Boston is that it is an England beyond the 
water, the place where academic learning is 
supreme; where refinement, tea parties, Toryism, 
mingle with vestiges of fox hunting into producing 
an agreeable England of the George III period. 
The Englishman is convinced, as a rule, that out- 
side Boston there exist in America no manners, 
but only morals; that Boston is included in the 
United States only by a misunderstanding; and 
that it is the spiritual home of the deans of Har- 
vard; it is, shall we say, Sussex or Westmoreland. 
The casting of those tea chests into Boston Harbor 
on a fine morning in the eighteenth century is for- 
gotten. Briefly, the Englishman feels affectionate 
about Boston, affectionate to the point of senti- 
mentality. 

Now, this is not entirely untrue, and I think I 
perceived this ghost of Boston an hour after I 
arrived. It was a Sunday morning, and under 
my window passed a little elderly lady dressed 



IN OLD AMERICA 21 

in satin of a color that was something between 
pink and mauve. The costume included a very 
tight bodice, with a collar closing about the neck, 
and the front part was abundantly garnished 
with white embroidery. On the top of her head 
was a little pork-pie hat. Between her small 
hands, gloved in kid, she carried a prayer book 
and a hymn book. Her boots I could not see (in 
her period one did not see a lady's boots), but they 
may have been elastic-sided. As she trotted off 
I told myself, "There goes the slender ghost of 
England's own Boston." Indeed, the Boston of 
old is fairly well sustained if one Is careful to visit 
only those parts of Boston which are haunted by 
the ghosts. Superficially, Old Boston does support 
the illusion that it is Old England. In the first 
place, the town is built of brick or of some solid 
material plastered with terra cotta. Some of the 
middle nineteenth-century portions look just like 
the worst examples of South Kensington archi- 
tecture, or even Dublin, which, as all English peo- 
ple know, is the most Victorian of our cities. 

Farther on, quite close to well-to-do houses, 
you find slums that might come straight from 
Westminster, black, tumble-down, and sordid. 
Then, suddenly, you encounter Beacon Street and 
Loulsburg Square, and Mount Vernon Street; 
there, among the flat. Colonial windows and the 



22 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

exquisite fanlights, the whole thing hardly modi- 
fied by the demands of the hot weather, you tell 
yourself again: "This is not America. This is 
Bath.'* Indeed, one might sum up by saying that 
Old Boston is a cross between Brighton and Edin- 
burgh. And very magnificent it is. It has an air 
of repose, as if it slept after action. The only 
error which the Englishman makes is when he 
thinks that some day it may wake up. 

A good way for the Englishman to maintain 
the illusion is to go to Harvard. He is pretty 
clear that Harvard is an inferior sort of Oxford, 
that it has a certain illegitimate relationship 
with the English institutions. He is ready to be 
rather kind to Harvard because he has heard of 
the wild and woolly colleges of Wisconsin and 
Illinois, and has a vision of academic seclusion 
contrasted with an orgy of college yells. He feels 
that Harvard is rather respectable, and when he 
is very well informed he considers that Yale also 
is quite nice, being, shall we say, a cousin fortu- 
nately twice removed. So everything depends 
upon whether your Englishman enters America 
via Boston or via New York. If he comes in via 
Boston he stays in his mood of good-tempered 
patronage, and says that Harvard is not a bad 
little show; but if he comes in via New York, if 
he has been chased by the trolley cars, hurled up 



IN OLD AMERICA 23 

to the twenty-third floor, and terrified by automo- 
biles which unreasonably insist on taking the right 
side of the road, he reaches Harvard in a state of 
extreme relief. He feels this is home. For my 
part, whose interest in America is not at all repre- 
sented by tea trays and fluted pillars, but by fac- 
tories where they can pork, I did not have that 
sense of relief. I found Harvard charming, with 
its green spaces and the gay, boxlike red buildings 
which are dotted about; I liked what one may 
call the domestic shape of this university. It is 
intimate, concentrated; indeed, it seems to have 
rallied; that is an important point in the psy- 
chological picture of America which I am trying 
to arrive at. To an Englishman Harvard (Harvard 
and Yale are in the same case) does not look 
like a typical university, because to an Englishman 
a university must be made up of Gothic buildings. 
Harvard (and I thank the Stars and Stripes for 
this) is not Gothic. It is Georgian, and it has the 
solid, deliberate air of the part of London which 
we call the Temple. It possesses one building of 
extreme beauty — Hollis Hall — one of the purest 
specimens of Georgian architecture that I have 
ever seen, for it is strong and at the same time it 
is light. It makes an effective contrast with Emer- 
son Hall, which seems to have been built on plans 
taken from the waste-paper baskets of several 



24 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

architects. But stones, after all, do not define 
a university. 

My impression of Harvard is taken rather from 
a few young men, notably a dignified sophomore 
and several rather noisy plebes, with whom I spent 
a week in a small hotel in New Hampshire. They 
are attractive, this generation that is being pro- 
duced by Harvard; their manners are charming, 
frank, diffident, curiously inclined toward the Eng- 
lish attitude. There is a difference, of course, for 
nobody seems able to breathe the air of Columbia, 
even when it is as rarefied as it is in Boston, without 
something of the champagne standard imposing 
itself upon the barley-water point of view of our 
typical Oxford tutor. Having since that time 
come into contact with the fuller-blooded product 
of Chicago, Evanston, and Wisconsin universities, 
I am conscious that Harvard represents, as I sug- 
gested before, a rally of Old America against the 
rush of New America. There seems to be in the 
mind of the young Harvard man a desire to main- 
tain the value of learning for the sake of learning, 
and perhaps to them applies the famous toast of 
the English professor, who raised his glass and said, 
"Here's to pure mathematics and may they never 
be of any damn good to anybody." 

By which I do not mean that Harvard is as 
detached from the current of American life as 



IN OLD AMERICA 25 

some of its detractors make out. Harvard repre- 
sents to me what I would call a semicolon in the 
American phrase. It represents American reflec- 
tiveness and American abstraction. Its under- 
graduates offer a very sharp contrast with the 
Yale men, some of whom I met in Bridgeport, 
Connecticut, and others whom I encountered in 
the Middle West. The Yale man, though it is 
dangerous to generalize, strikes me as the com- 
promise between Old America and New America; 
If Harvard is a semicolon in the American phrase, 
then Yale is the hyphen between the old phrase 
and the new. It is exactly in America in the 
same position as Cambridge University is in Eng- 
land. Yale seems to be trying to make the best of 
both worlds, the Old and the New, while Harvard 
lifts a quite virile voice in defense of the Old World, 
being willing to give to the New one nothing more 
than hostages. The importance of these old uni- 
versities lies in their definition of Boston, for 
Yale may be at New Haven, and yet it is quite 
sufficiently within the orbit of New England. The 
main import of these universities is that they are 
still registering a protest against the America 
which insists on being born. Though Harvard 
does not look upon the baby with aversion, and 
though Yale seems quite willing to take its share 
in nursing it, both of them are, to a certain extent. 



26 HAIL. COLUMBIA! 

anachronistic. I cannot help feeling that in 
America everything tends to become an anachro- 
nism unless it has been created in the current year. 
People say that America has no past; that is not 
quite true, but what seems to be true is that 
America scraps her past as she goes. She is like a 
soldier on the march who throws aside impedi- 
menta so as to get quicker to his goal. 

Several times, as I went back to my hotel, I 
encountered in Copley Square an unstirred Italian 
who reclined against a barrow laden with grapes. 
They were rather nice-looking grapes, at twenty 
cents a pound, and, wishing to be very American, 
I merely said to him, "Half." He filled my bag, 
maintaining in his mouth a corncob pipe, and took 
my ten cents without a word. Day after day the 
Italian so remained in Copley Square, always in the 
same attitude, his pipe, by some magic, always 
laden, his barrow always covered, apparently by 
the same grapes. People went into the free library, 
the trolley cars rattled by, and a passing dean no 
doubt resisted the temptation to eat fruit in the 
street; the Italian cared for none of these things. 
He was there when I arrived; he was the last thing 
I noticed as I left Boston. I could not help thinking 
that this intruder, so assured, so completely estab- 
lished in the ancient city, represented the army 
of occupation which has taken over Old Boston. 



IN OLD AMERICA 27 

Old Boston survives. You will see it, for Instance, 
in the exquisite State House, a classical Georgian 
building in white stone which shows what the 
National Gallery in London might have been if It 
had been built by the artist who created the State 
House. It survives, yes, as the shell. But a man 
who did not read the signs of New Boston must 
indeed be blind. Let him leave the State House 
and go down to Boston Common. There he may 
be charmed or amused by listening to a speaker 
who is trying to agitate an entirely listless public 
against the danger of Mormonism in the States; 
he may smile at the old loafer concealed within a 
wooden swan, who works treadles with his feet 
and thus paddles people on the ornamental water; 
he will think the old fellow a curious version of 
Lohengrin, but he must not Ignore the signs of 
New Boston built on the ruins of the Old. 

On that Common he will find some newly seeded 
grass into which is stuck a board. And this board 
does not say, "Please Keep Off the Grass," as It 
does in Hyde Park; the New Boston board says: 
" Keep Off the Grass. If you want to roam, join 
the Navy." That Is not at all how they would have 
put It in the days of Emerson. Also, In the days 
of Emerson, assuming there had been a subway, 
there would not have been in Boston the feverish 
commerclallty which has now created shops on 



28 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

the platforms. And, what Is much more Important, 
In the days of Emerson you would not have paral- 
leled the phenomenon which is exposed in the 
Boston telephone book. Happening to want the 
telephone number of a person whose name began 
with "O," I came upon the name, "O'Brien." I 
turned the page, and it was still *' O'Brien." The 
next page was inexorably still "O'Brien." Becom- 
ing haunted, I roughly counted the O'Briens; in 
Boston there are 480 O'Briens on the telephone. 
That means that there are at least 5,000 O'Briens 
not on the telephone; that with the families, 
20,000 Bostonians are called O'Brien. Well, add 
the O'Bynes, the O'Connors, the O'Donnels, etc., 
and what is the conclusion.^ Boston Is an Irish 
city. If it Is Fmis Bostonia, it Is the beginning 
of Limerick. It is also, if I can trust my ears, 
the beginning of New Russia, New Berlin, New 
Bohemia, and New Italy. In other words, Boston 
has not escaped the fate of cities more renowned 
for foreign immigration. It has become as foreign 
a city as Chicago, and it is only because something 
of its old tradition clings to It that people believe 
that Boston Is still Boston. 

I spoke to some Bostonians about this, and none 
of them denied; Indeed, they are sufficiently Im- 
pressed not even to deplore it. They are resigned; 
they realize that the Boston in which they live 



IN OLD AMERICA 29 

is a precarious delusion; they do not even main- 
tain hypocrisy, and when people give up hypocrisy 
they are giving up much of their pride. All over the 
northeast of America something new is rising. In 
Connecticut, especially, and even in the north of 
Vermont, you will find the foreign worker over- 
whelming the Yankee farmer, driving his sons out 
of work and making his sons such as himself, modi- 
fying the physical type of the Yankee; you see 
the factory buildings of the New America turn 
Bridgeport into a great industrial city; and now, 
if you cross Charles River into the poorer and the 
more industrial Boston, you discover, not the pre- 
tenders you met on Beacon Hill, but the sky- 
scrapers and the smokestacks overtopping the 
librarians and the catalogues. The story is simple 
enough. New England — and by New England I 
mean all the country that lies northeast of New 
York (despite the people who would confine New 
England to a little district which lies between 
Gloucester, Worcester, and Plymouth) — was the 
industrial nursery of the United States, and no 
doubt it went on very nicely, with hand labor and 
elementary machinery, up to the middle of the 
nineteenth century; but the New America insisted 
on pushing out toward the west, toward the fort 
surrounded by shacks, brand-new stores, and rough 
Lake piers which is now Chicago. Coal and iron 



30 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

appeared in Pennsylvania, oil, natural gas; the 
little railway which had united Boston with Salem 
found a terrible brother in the steely serpent which 
threw out its head, not only toward Chicago, but 
across the prairie toward the desert of Nebraska. 
Swiftly industry arose in Pittsburgh and in Illinois. 
Those people had no traditions; they had no old 
factories, no old plants. They had all their brains, 
all their energy, and no old habits to hamper them. 
Thus there arose outside New England a new 
mechanical industry which very soon began to 
promise ruin to the little factories of Massachu- 
setts. They would have been ruined probably 
through another cause, which was the loss of their 
water power, when the demand for pulp for paper 
compelled the cutting down of the forest of the 
north; it was the coal of West Virginia that saved 
New England, but it was the example of the West, 
and especially of Detroit, which induced New 
England to save itself. It has saved itself, and I 
spent a long day in the factories of Bridgeport, 
particularly at the American Chain Company, to 
see the most modern automatic plant turning out 
tire chains; and I saw an almost human dynamo 
in Massachusetts, a dynamo which warns the negli- 
gent human being when it is overloaded, and even 
switches itself off when it feels itself dangerously 
handled. Thus New England has saved itself 



IN OLD AMERICA 31 

from the industrial point of view, but in so doing 
it has transmuted itself. The metaphor of grub, 
chrysahs, and butterfly is apt to the transformation 
of Boston and the surrounding states. The old- 
fashioned people will no doubt say that Industrial 
New England is now in the unpleasant grub state, 
and that the land we know is the painful result 
of the sober butterfly which once hovered above 
the beautiful cottage roofs of Concord. For my 
part, I doubt it, because It seems to me that 
modern industry is the soldier who will conquer 
beauty and ease of life for all men, while the old 
times merely possessed beauty and comfort for a 
few men. 

The spectacle of New England to-day, and even 
the spectacle of Boston, with its swarming tene- 
ments, Its crowds of yelling children. Its resound- 
ing trolley cars, all this is really sane and splendid 
and full of promise for a luminous future. I weep 
no tears over Old Boston that lies In Its own dust, 
nor smile, for instance, at the Boston Mushroom 
Society. Boston still stands for good taste and 
for the appreciation of learning. Only it is danger- 
ous to concentrate upon academic Boston, because 
one may easily forget that within twenty years, If 
Boston develops on its actual lines. It will be a great 
industrial city. 

The modernism of Boston is found quite as 



32 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

easily as its age. For instance, in the trolley cars 
you are requested to report not only cases of dis- 
courtesy on the part of conductors, but also you 
are asked to report commendable acts. That is a 
revolution; for the old point of view as to labor, 
which prevails in Europe, is that it should be pun- 
ished when it does wrong, while the broad Amer- 
ican point of view is infinitely more human 
(though none the less mercenary); it holds that 
men work best when they are treated in a human 
way. Old Boston would never have thought of 
congratulating its conductors. It is New Boston, 
absorbing the business theories of the West, which 
seeks to develop in its employees the human quali- 
ties of courtesy and kindness. I do not suppose 
these remarks will mean much to my American 
readers, for they are accustomed to that point of 
view, but to an Englishman they are startling. 

Startling, too, is another item in Boston — 
namely, the office of the Christian Science Monitor. 
It is the most amazing newspaper office in the 
world; the walls are white, the floors are made of 
parquet, and carpeted. When you go in you think 
you are going into a government department closed 
for the night. But if you enter the subeditor's 
room you discover a large place, with about ten 
desks. Now, in most other newspaper offices you 
find dirty, whitewashed walls, tables stained with 



IN OLD AMERICA 33 

the Ink and carved by the knives of generations, 
masses of dusty papers, six weeks' torn Issues on 
the floor, mixed with the dottels of pipes and hun- 
dreds of cigarette stubs. Everybody bellows. 
Everybody smokes. Nearly everybody swears. 

At the Christian Science Monitor all work 
placidly at desks as neat as those of sinecurlsts; 
there Is no bustle; there Is no noise. In the com- 
posing room, even, the compositors are clean and 
collected; the only noise the Christian Scientists 
have been unable to repress Is that of the linotype 
machine. Do what they will. It Insists upon clank- 
ing. Well, I do not want to make out that the 
Christian Science Monitor Is an Indication of Finis 
Bostonia, but In reality It does amount to that, 
because the Monitor point of view Is the top notch 
of Industrial work. It represents the discovery 
that Industry need not be noisy, dirty, and fero- 
cious. Some may think that the roaring factories 
are more damaging to Old Boston, but for my part 
I suspect that this well-oiled organization goes a 
step farther and indicates the form which indus- 
try is going to take; in that sense, perhaps, the 
calm sweetness of the labor of that office is attend- 
ant upon the funeral of the dusty and musty libra- 
ries. The smoke-belching factories may be carry- 
ing Old Boston to its grave, but the harmonious 
organization of this extraordinary modern ofiice is 



34 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

laying a delicate wreath of flowers upon Old Bos- 
ton's grave. It is a significant contrast after the 
Monitor to go and see Old Boston trying to be New 
Boston in the shape of the Massachusetts General 
Hospital. 

You find a large site administered on spacious 
lines housing only 360 beds. It gives a good ex- 
ample by treating its nurses well; the nurses' 
quarters are fit to live in (which, in England, is 
seldom the case) and the nurses are not sweated. 
But what is interesting is the elderly quality of it 
all. I know that there is nothing elderly in the 
medical school of the hospital, which is practically 
the same as that of Harvard, but there is, through 
moderate payments, a maintenance of an air of 
gentility. At the Massachusetts Hospital patients 
are still selected; they are still investigated. It 
represents something that was fine — namely, the 
development of so much charity among the rich; 
that was suitable enough to the graceful feudalism 
of Old Boston city. But in the New Boston that 
is lifting its voice in a cry that may ultimately 
equal the shout of Chicago it represents nothing 
but survival, and one wonders if it will survive. 

Of course it will not survive, for nothing sur- 
vives, and each one of us takes his turn. Boston 
may yet snatch from the hand of Chicago the 
torch of progressive industry, while Chicago may 



IN OLD AMERICA 35 

become rich enough to give more thought to the 
immaterial; it will be able to afford that luxury. 
Boston may pass from the tradition of James 
Russell Lowell to the new one of Miss Amy Lowell, 
while Chicago may cease to respond to the verse 
of Mr, Carl Sandburg to turn to the polished 
rhymes of some new Keats. The new poet, looking 
out over Michigan Boulevard, may dream of 
Boston and pen melancholy lines to a Grecian urn. 
Just as I left Boston, In a noisy modern street, 
I found a saloon. All was complete, the bar still 
carrying its signs of whisky and of beer, the seats 
In front of It, upon their stumps, but no longer 
laden, the brass rod worn by feet, and the red- 
plush settees, where some rested after drinks and 
some waited before. There was nobody there. 
Where the bottles used to stand are boards which 
offer beef hash for twenty cents and stuffed pepper 
for ten. No more free lunch since liquor has gone, 
which warranted that freedom. Nothing now but 
emptiness and dust. It seemed to me that this 
desertion of the old saloon, child of the taverns 
where the clipper captains used to meet to drink, 
I suppose mulled claret and canary wine, is as 
significant of Finis Bostonia as the Installation of 
the most modern repetition plant. For here Is a 
revolution in the mind, which matters more than 
a revolution in the workshop. The old saloon 



36 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

meant as much to Boston as the learned ones who 
paced the greensward at Cambridge; it was part of 
the same adventurous individual life, where a man 
took a single chance and, when he succeeded, took 
his pleasure. Now, Boston is socialized indus- 
trially, and a new impulse toward efficiency has 
turned away the flow of its people from the taverns 
where it used to royster. It is not age which has 
killed Boston, for no cities die of age; it is the 
youth of other cities, of young America, who would 
not let Old Boston live unless it transformed itself 
as it is doing. So the old saloon is closed. Or no, 
it is more significant than that. The Old Boston 
saloon has its door ajar. It is still open, but 
hardly so. 



II 

AMERICA IN THE MAKING 

THERE is no peace In Chicago. In Chicago 
the past and the future give birth to an 
unruly being that angrily shakes the fetters of 
one tradition as it creates another which it throws 
away as it goes, Hke a snake which wearies of its 
skin and sloughs it off for a new one. It is a city 
of terror and light, untamed and unwearied. It 
has harnessed a white-hot energy to beginnings; 
upon its roofs it erects cities; it has torn the vitals 
of its streets for railway cuttings, set up porticoes 
as promises of colonnades. Grim is the heart 
within, and hot as molten metal. The city writhes 
in its narrow communications, as the head of 
Medusa among its tangled hair. Its suburbs lie 
like disjointed members, deprived of easy transit 
to the body: the suburban stores forbid it; they 
fear for their custom, and the politicians tumble 
and crawl in, graft, threat, and proclamation, over 
the great body that heaves, angry and chafed, yet 
negligent of what is not its daily labor, like a dray 
horse with bent head that shakes the tenacious 



38 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

flies. Here is room for lust and its repression, 
none for listlessness; here is everlasting struggle, 
no mild aspiration to peace. There is no peace in 
Chicago. . . . 

In my first chapter I recorded impressions of 
the Land of the Bean and the Cod, but now, with 
the Middle West before me, dazing me by the clash 
of its trolley cars, blinding me with the fire and 
cloud of its smokestacks, I hesitate. I hesitate 
partly because the Middle West is big, because 
it is real, and because, erected upon the pedes- 
tal of its worth, America attendant upon its tri- 
umph, it may not care to be analyzed at all. 
For it is a fable that the truly great tolerate 
criticism; nearly all detest it. Already I have 
earned trouble, hardly by criticizing America, but 
by alluding to her. In my new novel, Caliban, I 
make two allusions to America, and only two. In 
one case I mention a Miss Daisy Hogstein of Chi- 
cago. I say nothing about her. I merely mention 
her. And immediately a newspaper discusses the 
carping spirit in which the English, etc. In another 
place I say that my hero. Lord Bulmer, the ruth- 
less newspaper proprietor, would have been hap- 
pier in America than in England, a remark which 
applies to a good many men. Three newspapers 
violently deny that such a person would ever have 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 39 

been tolerated in a free republic which, etc. Again, 
in Boston, during the Mayflower celebration, I 
shyly pointed out that the early Virginians should 
also be remembered. A blast from Boston inti- 
mates that an Englishman, instead of talking of 
the things he doesn't understand, etc. 

What am I to do.? Am I to take the advice of 
a gentleman I met in Minnesota, who said to me, 
"When a foreigner comes over here, we want to 
hear the nice things." Well, anyone who reads 
these chapters will find as many nice things about 
America as is good for her self-conceit. Only, cases 
such as the three I quote make one a little nervous; 
one is afraid to generalize, and one must generalize 
when one is writing impressions of a country. I 
cannot do separate justice to Mr. Cristobal of El 
Paso, and Mr. Hiram Jebbison of Maine; I must 
find out in general the things that Mr. Cristobal 
and Mr. Jebbison have in common. I hope to do 
this in a later chapter, and now I want to general- 
ize on the Middle West. 

I have not spent a lifetime in America, but 
during my stay I have done nothing but study her. 
I have observed the country between Maine and 
Chicago; Illinois and Oklahoma; Missouri, Ten- 
nessee, and Pennsylvania; I have visited libraries, 
manufacturing plants, and oil wells; I have talked 
to a number of people, literary, industrial, com- 



40 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mercial, professional; to men, mothers, and girls; 
to Mayflower Americans, to galvanized Americans, 
to negroes, and to immigrants. And so I venture 
to lay down my narrow definition of the Middle 
West. For me the Middle West begins west of 
Pennsylvania. I feel that the real East never got 
very far away from the coast, that the West came 
to meet the people who sought it; it came fresh, 
free, untraditional, and thus very swiftly converted 
the old Englishmen of Colonial days into Amer- 
icans. In other words, to me the Middle West is 
the true America. The gay Orientalism of New 
York, the rigid dignities of Boston, the laughter 
and languors of the South — to me these things 
are not essentially American. The true America 
Is In the Middle West, and Columbus discovered 
nothing at all except another Europe. It may be, 
of course, that the Far West may alter my Im- 
pression, and that I may discover by the Golden 
Gate a yet more convincing America, but I doubt 
It; the Far West is still to too great an extent a 
pioneer country, just as the East Is to too great an 
extent a traditional country. The true American 
spirit appears to me as a blend of traditionalism 
and pioneering, and that Is what we find In the 
Middle West. 

In eight months, in Chicago, three thousand 
automobiles were stolen. Such a fact gives one an 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 41 

idea of the magnitude of the commercial activities 
of that city. I do not mean that automobile steal- 
ing has yet become a national industry, though 
it is going strong, but if automobiles can be stolen 
at the rate of forty-five hundred per annum, many 
scores of thousands must be making Chicago into 
the city of noise which it is. My first impression 
of Chicago was indeed noise. For nothing had I 
seen the traffic in Piccadilly Circus and on Boule- 
vard Montmartre. I had still to realize the impact 
upon the human ear of two lines of trolley cars 
running over cobbles, on wheels that are never 
oiled; this, combined with several hundreds of 
motor vehicles with their throttles open; this 
combined with a double line of elevated railways 
whose couplings are never oiled; and this com- 
bined with a policeman who acts as master of the 
revels by means of a whistle. What a whistle! A 
steam whistle.'' A steam policeman? In Chicago 
you never can tell. It was magnificent. I had 
a sense that here was something animal and un- 
tamed, something (as Carl Sandburg might put 
it) sanguinary and husky. Here no hint of leisure, 
nor of mercy, for mercy is a draft on time and life — 
in Chicago there is no time for life. 

This immense crowd that burrowed among the 
raging traffic wanted to get somewhere; it wanted 
that with an intensity, with a singleness of object. 



42 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

which I did not discover in Fifth Avenue. As I 
stood dazed, while the orange-sided taxicabs flitted 
past me, I began to understand the Chicago that 
says, "I want,'* and at the same time says, "I 
will." The policeman with his whistle at once 
taught me something; in London the policeman 
puts up a languid hand and is obeyed; in New York 
he puts out a white-gloved hand, remarks, "Go 
back," and is often obeyed; in Chicago he needs a 
whistle as a word of command, to control a people 
who will not obey. Chicago is a city which must 
be dominated, as if it were a magnificent and savage 
animal that plunges and rears. 

It is not for nothing that the predominating 
color of Chicago is orange. It is as if the city, in 
its taxicabs, in its shop fronts, in the wrappings of 
its parcels, chose the color of flame that goes with 
the smoky black of its factories. It is not for 
nothing that it has repelled the geometric street 
arrangement of New York and substituted there- 
for great ways with names that a stranger must 
learn if he can. As a rule he fails. His brain does 
not work properly. He is in a crowd city, and if 
he has business there, he tells himself, "If I weaken 
I sha'n't last long." 

The psychology of Chicago is deeply colored 
with self-love. It harbors blinding pride, the 
pride of the man who can do things, and has no 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 43 

use for the man who can't. Almost every edu- 
cated person in Chicago will call his city crude, 
perhaps even vulgar, but the end of the sentence 
exhibits love and pride. Pride is the essence of 
his feeling; the inhabitant of Chicago seems to 
find in his city an immense, unruly child, something 
that bellows, breaks windows, says unsuitable 
things . . . but grows, grows magnificently, se- 
cretly grows in dominating charm, in the charm of 
eternal adolescence, the charm of eternal desire. 

This psychology is not that of all the Middle 
West. In St. Louis, for instance, another civiliza- 
tion has more sobriety. Here is a big city. Here is 
Lindell Avenue, with its detached stucco or brick 
residences, which embody the respectability of the 
'sixties. Here is the new architecture of West- 
minster Place and Portland Place, which have the 
modesty, the solidity of a rich English suburb. 
Here is America respectable without ostentation, 
and here, too, lives the self-reliance of a city rich 
enough to afford splendor, to afford Forest Park 
and its open-air theater, its seventy-five hundred 
seats, its stage decorated with real trees. Here is 
tradition, about the feet of the new America rising 
In the heart of St. Louis; round the American cen- 
ter cling hundreds of little English grocers, fruit 
dealers, and mercers. Here is little Old England 
drying up, while in the middle of St. Louis the 



44 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

ambitious office buildings rise up seeking tlie new 
horizon. 

St. Louis lost something of its old direction when 
its breweries lost their occupation. This applies 
also to Cincinnati, where again I had the impres- 
sion of sobriety and comfort. To see the children 
of St. Louis in their playground is to understand 
another side of the Middle West, its material com- 
fort. There were two hundred of them, pupils of 
a free school, and all were clean; not one wore dirty 
or torn clothes. There is not a single city in 
England where you could visit a free school with 
such a result. It is not that the English are more 
careless of their children than other people: it 
is that they do not possess the material wealth 
which makes the Middle West so splendid an ex- 
hibition. No more than Europe has America made 
full use of her opportunities; the haste of produc- 
tion produces commercial crises, overstocking, and 
therefore poverty; tenements are vile and nurture 
immorality. But America has wealth In hand, 
which Europe has not; only work Is wanted. 

Possibly the American works harder, though I 
have never found that hard work naturally led to 
high rewards. They do work enormously hard. 
For instance, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the trolley cars 
which make for the business district are almost 
empty at 8.30 a.m. By that time nearly every- 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 45 

body is at work. And, at Chicago, I was interested 
by a big business building opposite my hotel, when 
I noticed that at nine o'clock in the evening many 
of the offices were still tenanted. I began to 
watch that building. At nine o'clock work was go- 
ing on in thirty-eight offices; at 10.15 p-M. there 
was energy still in ten; at 11.35 P-M- three offices 
were preparing to break into the next day. I 
don't know what happened next, for I went to 
bed; I am not from Chicago. 

In Chicago work is dramatic; its spirit is Im- 
pressive; I cannot ignore a picture postcard I 
bought there; it bears merely these words, "Ex- 
perience is a dead loss if you can't sell it for 
more than it cost you." A variation of an im- 
mortal truth . . . which may shock some gentle 
soul. Well, it doesn't shock me. I like the ex- 
tremism of It, just as I like the massive place 
where this sentiment circulates. I like Chicago, I 
like the colossal lines of its point of view, its re- 
ligion of utility, its gospel of fitness, just as I like 
its streets, its attempt on South Michigan Boule- 
vard to force even the lakeside into straight lines. 
You will find this heavy power in a store like 
Marshall Field's, a commercial city within a com- 
mercial city, a place so vast that one would wel- 
come as a guide through its labyrinth a thread 
woven by Arachne. This mystic thread of the 



46 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mythological spider — does Marshall Field stock it ? 
Probably. 

You have the same feeling in Washington Park, 
in the vast space which suggests that America 
always has plenty of land, even enough for its 
pleasure grounds. To an outsider Chicago seems 
too big for mankind, but mankind in Chicago does 
not appear worried by that fact. Indeed, it enjoys 
size; it likes the enormous whiteness of the monu- 
ment to Time, in Washington Park; it finds its 
great university worthy of itself; it is typical of 
Chicago's faith in its own future that, in one part 
of that university, it called a certain space a 
quadrangle when only two sides of it were built. 

The Middle West can afford to trust a future 
of which the present is merely the vestibule. I 
like to think of the time to come when the ledges 
between the Lakes have been dredged out and 
when the fleets of the world will come sailing up 
the St. Lawrence, through the Lakes, and moor 
opposite the Congress Hotel, there to unload the 
spices of India and the caviar of the Black Sea. 
Mass and space; that, to me, defines the Middle 
West. Consider the Continental and Commercial 
Security Company's Building. It is a bank in 
Chicago, and conducts its activities in a hall that 
looks like a railway station. The building exhibits 
all the splendid dryness of line of American archi- 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 47 

tecture; Its pillars rise up contemptuous to an ob- 
scure heaven. Indeed, the Continental and Com- 
mercial Security Company is housed in a work 
of art made more estimable by being also a work 
of perfect utility. Or again, go farther south, to 
little Tulsa, which twenty years ago did not exist, 
and look at the great Cosden Building. England 
has been in business for a thousand years and did 
not think of a building higher than nine floors; 
Tulsa needed it before it was twenty yeats old. 
There is no precedent for this. 

But these altitudes are by the way, though they 
are to a certain extent indications of spirit. It 
is in the manufacturing plants of America that 
human vigor expresses itself best. I have seen a 
number of them, dealing in steel, flour, timber, but 
in a way Armour's is most remarkable. Armour's 
is remarkable not so much because it has divided 
the operations of labor as far as human ingenuity 
can go, but because of the material on which it 
works. To watch an animal from the pen to the 
tin is an extraordinary experience. You see it 
killed; it falls; a conveyor carries it away. It is 
flayed while you wait. It disappears. Then, sud- 
denly, it is an open carcass; it passes the veteri- 
nary; in a few seconds it is cut up, and hurriedly 
you follow the dwindling carcass that is no longer 
an ox, but fragments of meat; you see the meat 



48 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

shredded; in another room the manicured girls are 
fining the shreds into tins, and the tin is closed and 
labeled. The thing that astounds is the quiet 
officialdom of this murder. It is as if nothing had 
happened. Death is so swift, the evidence of 
tragedy so soon gone, that one feels no shock that 
flesh loses its character. Cattle are being handled 
like brass, so swiftly that life becomes merely a raw 
material. That is Chicago. A superior force, 
which is called organized industry, has cut up the 
cattle on a traveling belt and carried them away. 
For a moment I have a vision of Chicago carried 
away on its own traveling belt. Carried away 
. . . where to? 

I did not have so strong an impression of the 
steel-rolling mills, no doubt because I know some- 
thing about metals and know nothing about cattle. 
Rolling mills are familiar with their clank, their 
dust, and all that. It was at Minneapolis, at the 
Washburn-Crosby Mills, that I rediscovered the 
magnificence of the Middle West. Here again is the 
immense swiftness of modern industry, not bloody 
this time, but dainty. The flour mills are like 
drawing-rooms, lightly powdered as befits. For 
the first time in my life I saw a factory with par- 
quet floors. There is a fascination in these things, 
the fascination of uniform movement. You watch 
the grain from the elevator on to the belt, then 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 49 

to the grinder, to the shaking sieves, to the tests 
which exhibit purity, to the hoppers which hu- 
manly discharge just as much as the sack will hold. 
The sack falls into a truck, and it is gone. There 
is something lovely in these great works; they 
are deserts, void of men. Nothing is handled that 
can possibly be seized by fingers of steel. There are 
solitude and activity; there is nothing there save 
iron and lumber, in the midst of which sits some 
secret, invisible soul. Somehow I feel that in these 
great plants I see before me the future of the 
world, a world where the machine will be a serv- 
ant shepherded by new men and women, in rai- 
ment which they no longer need to soil, and who 
will with polished finger nails touch buttons that 
convey intelligent messages. 

The great plants of the Middle West seem to me 
to sublimate human intelligence and to promise a 
time when mankind will be free from sweat; the 
curse of Adam may yet be lifted by Chicago. In 
so doing the Middle West is doing something else; 
it is creating beauty. I say this, realizing the con- 
tempt that may fall upon this opinion from 
academic quarters. There is beauty elsewhere than 
in lace; there is a rugged beauty, and there is a 
beauty of supreme utility. These great factories 
are worthy exponents of the forgotten William 
Morris; there everything is useful, and it Is not 



50 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

excessive to say tliat everything is beautiful be- 
cause everything is strong. Naturally the strong 
are not also the subtle; with strength goes a cer- 
tain crudity of expression and of thought. I do 
not refuse to see the almost comic contrast between 
a great plant and the mottoes in its showroom. 
Here are two: "Never put off till to-morrow what 
you can do to-day." There is something a little 
obvious in that, and mischievous Europeanism 
induces me to retort, "Never do to-day what you 
can do to-morrow; you may never have to do it 
^t all." Again, there is vulgarity in this other 
motto: "Be like a postage stamp. Stick till you 
get there." But Talleyrand was right in saying 
that you cannot make omelets without breaking 
eggs. The Middle West cannot be expected to 
prepare the omelet of the future without making 
a mess of the eggs of the skylark and the dove. 
But it can be trusted with those of the American 
eagle. 

The Middle West, I repeat It, is doing beauti- 
ful things. It has even produced a great work of 
art — the grain elevator. Stop for a moment out- 
side the mills of Pillsbury, or Washburn-Crosby, 
in Minneapolis, and consider the lofty towers of 
these elevators, their rounded magnificence, marred 
by no fanciful nonsense such as pediments or por- 
ticoes or garlands, or suchlike Renaissance futility; 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 51 

consider the purity of the Hnes rising sheer; the 
elevator is Hke a turreted castle, spectral white, 
and as free from excrescences as the phrase of a 
great prose writer from useless words. The towers 
cluster under their cubic tops, dignified and serene. 
I have seen the cathedrals of America, and her 
grain elevators. I have seen nothing nobler than 
these factories of the moon. 

A material component in the psychology of the 
Middle West is the haste and intensity with which 
its natural wealth is being developed. One obtains 
a clear idea of this wealth through a short visit 
to one of the great state fairs, such as the one which 
I encountered in Minnesota. These fairs fortify the 
impression derived from the endless wheat and 
corn fields between Minnesota and Kansas; fields 
without end: that sums up the impression. When 
one talks to the farmers, slow, cautious, not un- 
amiable, though faintly suspicious, one under- 
stands the speculation in real estate which has 
swept over the Middle West; one hears extraor- 
dinary stories of farms of five or six hundred acres, 
which are now worth one hundred dollars an acre; 
of market gardens sold for a thousand dollars an 
acre; one is told that a generation ago this was 
wild land for which somebody gladly took fifteen 
dollars. One hears stories of sudden wealth; one 
visits a farmstead and discovers with a certain sense 



52 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

of the inappropriate that not only has the farmer 
an automobile, but each of his sons has one too; 
there is a grand piano — but also a gramophone. 
It feels sudden, improvised, and all the more so 
when one finds out how careless is the farming. 
Most of the land is being sweated, the crops taken, 
and nothing put back by an adventurous agri- 
culturist who intends to push on farther west when 
he has looted the land. I encountered no crops 
comparing with the European; most of the yields, 
particularly of wheat, are about one third to one 
half of a French crop. And the land is better! I 
am not crying out, "Waste!" for I do not know all 
the factors; what interests me is the reaction on 
American psychology. This wastefulness, this ex- 
cess, all that is evidence of the immense bountiful- 
ness of the land. Men farm best where the land is 
cruel, as in Scotland; in the Middle West the 
land is beneficent, and so it is no wonder that a 
trait of Middle- West psychology should be good- 
tempered hospitality and generosities that surprise 
the European; the Middle West can afford virtues. 
It was an unforgetable impression, an impression 
of a Land of Cockayne, that I obtained at the Min- 
nesota State Fair. The corncobs were so large, 
so smooth; they showed fruit fit for photography 
in Christmas supplements; tomatoes which threat- 
ened the pumpkin; dark grapes; fish and game — 




THE GRAIN ELEVATORS ARE LIKE TURRETED CASTLES, SPECTRAL WHITE 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 53 

and, what counts also, by the side of the leather, 
the oil, the horses, and the tools, the indications of 
pioneer culture, the posters by the school children, 
the still queerer emotional life, represented by the 
societies of the Irish and the veterans. There was 
a lot of everything — the word " shortage " is not 
American. No class has quite so much as it wants, 
but it always has more than the corresponding 
European class. That is why you can visit in 
America a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants 
and find there better shops, better goods, more 
artistic stuffs, more attractive furniture, and, in 
unexpected spots, a more vivid culture than in 
any English town — wealth leads to aristocracy; 
out of wealth America will breed hers. The poor 
aristocrat is a popular illusion. Indeed, an aristo- 
crat may be poor, but he must be the son or the 
grandson of an aristocrat who was rich. Without 
wealth aristocracy cannot survive; without wealth 
it cannot be born. Wealth does not necessarily 
create aristocracy, but it can do so. I feel that 
the aristocracy of America will not be maintained 
out of the elegancies of Boston or the languors of 
South Carolina, but is being born, born of the 
rugged, fierce stock of the Middle West. After all, 
the early aristocrats, the Normans and the Cru- 
saders, too, were kid-gloved neither in their morals 
nor in their manners. 



54 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

The reader will realize from the foregoing that I 
have not joined the faintly envious clamor against 
the Middle West. The Middle West, by the fact 
of its novelty, shows its "seamy side"; the dust 
of ages, which has filled the seams of Paris and 
London town, has not had time to make for the 
West a glossy surface. And so the East, with three 
hundred years behind it, is more acutely conscious 
of Chicago than the foreigner can be. Certainly, 
from the Eastern point of view, Chicago is what 
you might call difficult. I can understand that a 
banking family in Manhattan, harking back to 
bankers of New Amsterdam, dislikes the un- 
ashamed boosting which Chicago indulges in. Do 
not attack me because I say "boosting"; it is 
Chicago's own word. At the top of every page 
of one of the Chicago newspapers you will find 
every day a different legend. Here are two, which 
I extract, collected during my stay in Chicago: 
"Why Chicago is great: Chicago has more than 
twenty thousand manufacturing plants." Here is 
another: "Be a Chicago booster to your friends in 
other cities." Well, yes, it is a little difficult; it 
crows over the fallen; there is nothing delicate 
about it. But Chicago never was delicate; no 
more was any man at arms. Chicago is the man 
at arms of modern industry; that has to be remem- 
bered when you criticize it at work or at leisure. 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 55 

It has a passion for fact; a passion for realities 
malleable as cement before they are applied to in- 
dustry, hard as cement in the end. Chicago is 
prouder than Boston, because it is surer of itself. 
It has built its castle upon the future — for Chicago 
a secure foundation. That is why there is no peace 
in Chicago, and why, if ever Chicago attains peace, 
it will be the nefarious peace of a termination. 

Indeed, the whole Middle West is Chicagoan; 
it is conscious of itself, more conscious than any 
other part of America. Its local feehng is intense. 
That baffles one sometimes, when one discovers 
that the man who is talking to you Is not talking 
about America, but about his own state. I had 
two evidences of it, in each case owing to something 
having been said against the people or the manners 
of a certain state; in each case denizens of the state 
protested violently, but when it came to attacking 
America they did not mind much. The state 
meant to them something more intimate, some- 
thing more precious than America itself. 

That characteristic has been observed and 
laughed at; it has earned for America a provincial 
reputation, which seems to me absurd, when we 
consider that the American spirit arises from an in- 
tellectual congress of all the world spirits, America 
is not provincial; America is regional. That is 
natural when one considers that its size is so great 



S6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

that only a minority of Americans can afford a 
journey longer than twenty-four hours, and that 
this long journey — long enough to traverse the 
whole of Great Britain — will not take a man be- 
yond the borders of the next Middle-Western 
state. It is natural that the American should be 
insular, for every state Is an island cut off by dis- 
tance. There is another reason, which is less obvi- 
ous, and that is the political arrangement of 
America. The traveling Englishman tends to look 
upon cities such as Minneapolis or St. Louis as 
provincial cities, provincial In the English sense of 
Manchester or Birmingham. He is wrong. He 
forgets that some of the big cities are capitals of an 
almost sovereign state; in many cases cities no 
larger than Jefferson, Nashville, Albany, have their 
Capitols. That makes a difference. Glasgow, with 
Its eight hundred thousand inhabitants, is nothing 
but a provincial city. It sends a few members to the 
British Parliament, and, for the rest, it is nothing. 
It has a City Council, holds powers over traffic 
and sanitation, etc., but no more. Compare that 
with a small American capital, which has its own 
parliament, which makes Its own absolute laws on 
civil relations, marriage, inheritance, etc. Con- 
sider the effect upon local life, notably the creation 
of a governing class in the state, an official class, 
a natural center for education and culture. From 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING S7 

that point of view the difference is enormous; 
Lancashire is merely a province, but Rhode Island 
is almost a sovereign state. Therefore, a man from 
Rhode Island is a subject of Rhode Island as much 
as a subject of America, whereas a man from Lan- 
cashire is a British subject, carrying a vague 
geographical label. 

To me this is a good thing. I believe that there 
are in the world only two perfect constitutions: 
one is the Swiss; the other the American. How 
these constitutions work out is another question, 
but, taken by themselves, they are perfect, because 
they provide a maximum of home rule for people 
living under different climates, therefore people of 
different mentality, and especially provide almost 
complete freedom for people of different races. It 
almost looks as if Alexander Hamilton and his 
friends had foreseen that their country would be- 
come the melting pot of the world. 

If it were not for state liberty, I imagine that 
America would have experienced much greater diffi- 
culties during the war, when it had to deal with 
hostile German-Americans and with almost slug- 
gish Scandinavian and Czecho-Slovak Americans. 
If all power had been concentrated at Washington, 
I wonder if the problem could have been handled 
at all. As it was, with executive powers that were 
accustomed to deal exclusively located in every 



58 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

state, the problem was minimized by being divided. 
If I were an American, I should be one of those 
who jealously resist any extension of power to the 
Federal authorities; I should stand for my state 
first, because I should believe that the people of 
my own state were closer to me in temperament 
than citizens of the same country living three thou- 
sand miles away. 

The state system seems to be manifestly ideal, 
as I observe the German-American. Let my read- 
ers overlook the hyphen. It is no use pretending 
that all are loo-per-cent Americans. Some are, 
and some are not. What matters is that the per- 
centage, if it is less than loo per cent, should be 
a good, healthy percentage likely to grow as the 
generations pile up. 

I encountered a good many German-Americans 
in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and farther south. They 
were not crushed or uncomfortable; several of 
them spoke German among themselves, but in 
most cases I felt that they were Americans first, 
and German only in their memory. One of them, 
who arrived in America at the age of sixteen, and 
who had married an American-born wife, expressed 
to me his deliberate intention of "becoming" a 
lOO-per-cent American; another, who had arrived 
at the age of eight, was almost completely Amer- 
icanized — remembered only a few German words 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 59 

that his mother had spoken. A third, who Immi- 
grated at a later age, was a Httle sad; he could 
not help feeling the disaster which had come upon 
his country, and put his situation simply: *' What's 
the use of thinking of the things that happened in 
the past ? The only thing is to settle down in this 
country, which is good to us, and do the best we 
can for ourselves." Then, with a flash of insight, 
"To do the best for ourselves in America, it seems 
to me that's the best thing we can do for America 
itself." In other words, the American magnet 
seems to draw the national traits out without 
shaming them. For instance, in St. Paul, a large 
board in a building plot announces that an edi- 
fice will shortly become "the future home of the 
German-American industries." In the same town 
there is still a Folks Zeitung. In other words, the 
German-American is holding his head up, which 
means that nobody is beating it down. That seems 
to be the right way. 

It is part of the vitality of the Middle West 
that it should put as much energy into its pleasures 
as it does into its work. That is perhaps American, 
rather than Middle-Western, for, in general, the 
American seems to work sixteen hours a day. He 
may call one occupation hustling freight, another 
one eating, another golf, but it is all work. And 
whether this is a vice or a virtue may be discussed 



6o HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

later on. But In the Middle West there is a curious 
intensity of organization. Almost every town has 
a guidebook, indicating pleasures. I have a col- 
lection of them, such as. Now in St. Louis, The 
Visitor s Handy Guide to Minneapolis, Seeing Chi- 
cago, What Is Doing in Cincinnati, In Kansas City 
This Week, etc. You will never find that in Europe, 
except in the capital. In minor European towns 
the favorite diversion is sleep; I believe the average 
American would prefer nightmare. He is always 
doing, always planning; he follows Mr. Arnold 
Bennett and learns to live on twenty-four hours a 
day. When he takes his pleasure in a cultural 
form he is sometimes rather grave; in fact, there 
is a certain gravity in all American pleasures, 
though noisy, because they are taken intensely 
and thoroughly. If the American acted otherwise 
he would feel that he was wasting the good raw 
material of life. So the American pleasure crowds 
are more vivid than those of Europe; they are 
not so light, they are perhaps not so spontaneous, 
but anybody who has sat at the movies, or watched 
"Babe" Ruth excite his crowd, realizes the depth 
of feeling that the American puts into moments 
ferociously snatched from his daily work. 

Naturally, in the Middle West with this goes 
what the East calls crudity. The West is plain- 
spoken, and does not waste anything of its appeal. 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 6i 

It realizes that pleasure is one of the national 
products, just as it tells one that the film industry 
is the fourth in order of importance. So it puts 
things briefly. It advertises on a boarding that to- 
night there will be a "vodvil," which is a way of 
expressing eagerness and economy of effort foreign 
to the more languid tradition of "vaudeville." I 
had the same Impression in St. Paul, where, out- 
side a restaurant, stands merely in enormous let- 
ters the word, "Eat." It is unvarnished; it says 
to you : " Do you want a good time .? Come Inside," 
instead of saying, more or less, "Within will be 
found diversions for the families of gentlefolk." 
I saw the Middle West at play In Barnum's circus 
as It went through Kansas City. Kansas City 
was perhaps not the best place to see intensity, 
for to me it is a Southern town. It is a joyful, de- 
lightful town, with Its patchwork of black and 
white faces, its bright colors, its lovely sunshine, 
and its sense of prosperity. 

I found out that the circus was coming because 
the streets filled up. The sidewalks were lined 
with rows of colored women and solemn pickanin- 
nies. A little farther were the whites, who pre- 
tended not to be interested, but stood about all 
the same, talking hard and forbearing from going 
to their business. Just behind me a shine shop, 
conducted by seven negroes, added the sounds of 



62 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

a gramophone to their labors; from time to time, 
at the proper moment of syncopation, the shiners 
all together brought down their brushes upon a 
board! It felt very "South," but it was Middle 
West all the same. There was no mistake about 
that when you reached the main street. Kansas 
City, that day, was in the hands of its circus. It 
stayed in its hands all the week, though one would 
have thought that the vast tent, which seats seven 
or eight thousand people round the eight standards 
laden with electric lights, could have taken in, 
in one night, the idlers of the town. The point is 
that the circus did not appeal to the idlers, but to 
the whole of Kansas City, to the whole population, 
determined to take all the pleasure it could. I 
never saw a more responsive audience, piled forty 
feet high. In the amphitheater of the tent there 
was a constant swirl of excitement, a craning to the 
right and left, as if to miss nothing of what was 
going on in the three rings. Barnum's could not be 
anything but American; it is too large. Europe 
has never sent twenty clowns together, or three 
motor-car loads of comics on any stage; nor would 
we think of showing together dancing elephants, 
jujitsu, and a tree-chopping competition. The 
effect bewilders — the excessive lighting, the exces- 
sive variety. It is a savage entertainment, a shower 
of pleasures before some barbarian conqueror. 




THE APPEAL OF THE CIRCUS IS PERENNIAL THROUGHOUT THE LAND 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 63 

In the grounds they sold bright balloons, pink 
or electric blue. As we came back upon the trolley- 
car it was almost full of colored people. A young 
negress in strawberry pink was laughing as she 
enticed aloft one of those light balloons. She had 
fine Parisian features, twinkling black eyes. As 
the balloon descended too suddenly upon a sharp 
finger nail, it burst, and she vanished, weeping, 
among the consolations of two enormous mam- 
mies, one in yellow satin with a blue sunbonnet. 

I do not quite know what I mean, but I feel that 
the pleasure of the circus expresses something im- 
portant in the Middle West. The circus is most 
successful from Ohio westward, and south of the 
Mason and Dixon line. It makes an elementary 
contrast with the more sophisticated rhythms of 
Broadway. It expresses difficulty, natural strength, 
skill, and it gives through acrobats its thrills of 
terror. The Minnesota State Fair, for instance, 
offered as a sensation a crash between two loco- 
motives launched upon a track; another was an 
aeronautical feat — the passage of the aviator from 
one plane to the other, both being in motion. It 
means something, all that; it conveys something 
fierce in Middle-Western psychology, something 
rooted deep in the spirit of the pioneer. The man 
who has taken risks values other men only if they 
take risks. He likes danger for its own sake, though 



64 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

he is afraid, like other men, when he meets it. It 
stimulates him physically; he is not content with 
the languid songs and the rosy lights of the more 
ancient civilizations. 

It is an apparent paradox that the effort of the 
Middle West should be as cultural as it is sensa- 
tional. I feel that in Middle- Western psychology 
you will find almost equal interest in, let us say, a 
fight between a lion and a bull, and the latest play 
by Mr. Bernard Shaw. That is not such a paradox 
as it seems. If we find, as I did in St. Paul, a book- 
shop where three complete shelves are devoted to 
the works of Mr. Joseph Conrad, in Chicago, an 
appreciation of good literature that has developed 
bookshops such as one can hardly find abroad; if 
you find universities rising upon the prairie and 
within two or three years collecting five thousand 
students, who arrive there straight with the straw 
in their hair; if you find in young cities like Min- 
neapolis a splendid university; in little Tulsa, 
that is not twenty years old, a high school made 
of white stone — it merely means that here again 
are the characteristics of Middle-Western desire. 

The Middle West wants things, everything, 
everything that man can get, whether it is gold, 
or love, or knowledge; it wants even aestheticism. 
In the office of an editor, a little while ago, I met 
a woman whom I will call a missionary of the 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 65 

Middle West. She was one of those elderly women, 
full of fire and conviction, whose emotions have 
flowed into a single channel. With a volubility 
that sometimes was bitter and sometimes in- 
flamed, she was going the round of all the news- 
papers in America to induce them to give space 
every day to facts about pictures and sculpture. 
She was being rather cynically received that day 
by a very charming editor, who had been in journal- 
ism for a long time and kept few illusions. His 
indifference excited her; the glow in her eyes grew 
as she explained that the women of the Middle 
West were aching for contact with pictures. She 
was told that not one out of ten thousand educated 
people cared for pictures. She replied that the 
love of pictures came from the emotions, and that 
education was not the ground where emotions 
flourished. When laughed at, she replied, with im- 
movable faith, that we did not know her women, 
that we had not seen them, after a long day's 
work, go to a loan exhibition. She even told us 
that one of the old ladies came to her with tears in 
her eyes, after looking at a Turner; the moral 
strain, which is so strong in Americans, made her 
suggest that to push forward pictures was the 
right thing to do. She was wholly vital and full 
of faith. Now faith to a European is always a little 
funny. We cannot help it, yet I was moved by the 



66 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

hopefulness, the sincerity of all this, believing, as 
I do, that it does not matter much what one puts 
faith in, if one manages to have any faith at all. 
It seemed to me so indicative of the Middle West. 
I realize that much of the admiration which pic- 
tures obtain is mechanical; that it arises from a 
dull desire to improve one's mind, which is an 
awful idea. But still it is desire, it is hope, it is an 
aspiration to make an atmosphere where taste will 
have its chance, a chance which it may not secure 
in a more cynical and faded land. 

The Middle West respects the arts. In Europe 
the arts are the scullions of the idle and the rich. 
In the Middle West they seem to be ignored by a 
great many busy people, but they do somehow 
earn their respect. There are large circles which 
specialize in the arts, whose appreciation sometimes 
takes unexpected forms. For instance, at a large 
tea party in Chicago, some fragments from a novel 
of mine were read aloud. It was very em.barrass- 
ing. It was something that could never have 
happened in Europe. Europeans would have felt 
as self-conscious about it as I. But when I re- 
covered from my embarrassment I understood that 
here was honest appreciation; here was a real lik- 
ing for the words that were being read. It is this 
genuineness that in the Middle West appeals to 
one all the time. In places culture attains singu- 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING G-j 

larity. There is In Chicago a curious, decadent 
Httle club, with orange couches, gray-green walls, 
and orange curtains decorated with black lace; the 
yellow walls are flowered in black. Here are crystal 
and dancing and an aspiration to Paris or Vienna. 
That is a new Middle West, no longer the Middle 
West of the lecture club, but a Middle West which 
has digested its conquests and is developing into 
sophistication. 

On the whole, though, the Middle West remains 
itself, almost untouched. You will find its solidity 
in its bookshops, where appear Mr. Chesterton, 
Miss Clemence Dane, Mr. Galsworthy, Mr. Con- 
rad, Mr. Beresford, etc., and many works on demo- 
cratic and sociological questions. Almost every- 
where, too, "liberal" bookshops, which seem to 
specialize in radical pamphlets and in Russian lit- 
erature. Nothing of that can be ignored. It is 
all part of the great rush of desire which is the 
central fact of the Middle West. It is the desire 
of the pioneer who has just made his money. Not 
many years ago he used to come up to the cities 
for a magnificent spree in the saloons. Now his 
wife has taught him other lessons and he is coming 
up to the cities to have a great spree on modern 
civilization. 

I suspect that the only way In which one can 
obtain a truthful picture of Middle- Western psy- 



68 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

chology Is by realizing that the Middle West is 
still a pioneer country. In a sense, most of America 
is still pioneering. It has only touched the edge 
of its natural resources; the individual chances 
are still immense, and that is perhaps why social- 
ism has made in America less progress than it has 
in Europe. I have been told that in America a 
man of forty has either made his way or will never 
make it at all. I do not mean by this that at forty 
he must be a millionaire, but at forty he must 
have achieved his position as director of a corpora- 
tion, maker of chairs, or artisan, according to his 
capacities. At forty he has either failed or suc- 
ceeded; as he grows older he will not find himself 
more respected, as he would in Europe. Therefore, 
he knows that the individual struggle is hot; he 
struggles, and has little time for socialistic ideas. 
Moreover, he is born to a birthright that no western 
European enjoys. An English boy of seventeen 
knows pretty well what the future can give him. 
If he is born in the gentleman class and has money, 
he knows that he can be Prime Minister; if in the 
gentleman class but without money, he knows 
that he can hope to make ten to twenty thousand 
dollars a year in one of the professions, and perhaps 
in business; but if he is a poor boy who has gone 
to the national school he knows perfectly well that, 
barring extraordinary accidents, he will always be 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 69 

a small man, an employed man, a minor shop- 
keeper, etc. That is not the situation in America. 
Every boy knows that nothing need stop him, 
that no class bar will cut him off from any posi- 
tion or any office. In politics, notably, he knows 
that he has not to fear the rivalry of the old 
American families, because they stand aloof from 
politics; lastly, he knows that in the West of his 
country lies land which has seldom been trodden 
by a white foot. Therefore, there are resources 
which he can take, and, being a normal human 
being, he tries to secure his share. In other words, 
he is born a pioneer. I do not want to exaggerate; 
many millions of Americans are perfectly content 
to go on indefinitely in the occupation they have 
drifted into, and seek only more wages or more 
salary, but the thing that matters is the conscious- 
ness in the American mind that everything is open 
and everything is possible. 

The Americans are called an ambitious race; 
that is not wonderful, for their country contains 
food for ambition. You have this feeling if you 
visit a real pioneer town. Such a thing cannot 
be found at all in Europe, while in America it 
is still fairly common. I experienced that feeling 
when I spent several days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 
a town of seventy-two thousand inhabitants, and 
which twenty years ago did not exist at all. It 

6 



JO HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

has arisen on the oil fields; the district Is still 
so deeply in the pioneer stage that four years ago, 
a few miles away, at a place called Slick, there 
was a big saloon where the cash desk was per- 
manently guarded by a man with a loaded rifle. 
Now, what is interesting in Tulsa is the remnant 
of the pioneering spirit as it recedes before the 
bank and the trolley car. Both spirits still dwell 
there. Already long business streets and tall office 
buildings have arisen everywhere. But they can- 
not rise fast enough; that Is the essence of Tulsa. 
For Instance, the president of the Exchange Na- 
tional Bank, which Is located In a building of fifteen 
floors, told me that they had reserved for the bank 
a certain space; the bank outgrew the space In six 
months. But a hundred yards away from the big 
bank, the modern hotel with Its luxurious lounge 
and Its French restaurant, next door to the rail- 
way station, lies a green field, where at night the 
locusts sing in thousands. Civilization jostles the 
wild! It jostles It In the most extraordinary way. 
For in this young city there is an active social life, 
much dining and dancing; smart little cafes, danc- 
ing clubs, and musical societies have formed; the 
newspapers already have their traditions; at night 
the electric light blazes in the city, to the amaze- 
ment of the Osage Indians, who sit in their blan- 
kets upon the hills that overlook the town. 




WEALTH GUSHES FROM THE GROUND IN TORRENTS 



AMERICA IN THE MAKING 71 

Tulsa has just happened. A visit to Owens Park, 
for instance, is a revelation of speed; it is so new, 
its trees are so young, that at ten o'clock in the 
morning it is impossible to find in it a satisfactory 
square yard of shade. Here is the country of the 
new men, the oil men. I have watched them for 
a long time, nearly all of them rather dry, tall 
Yankees, or of the new American type, dark and 
rather heavy. All look hard; all live on oil; I 
have a vague feeling that in Oklahoma the limita- 
tions of morals and of law are the limitations set 
by the police, and occasionally by lynch law. Here 
is the new edition of Brandy Gulch. The men 
outnumber the women, some of whom belong to a 
rather hectic type. But already the mothers and 
the young ladies range the town; civilization is 
swift upon the pioneers' trail. 

Tulsa is still a mining camp; it expresses itself in 
violent films, just as a few years ago it expressed 
itself in its saloons. It still has a vast population 
housed in shacks, but a population that presses a 
button when it wants a glass of water or a team 
of elephants. All rests on oil, and I had the good 
fortune to be present at a well when oil was struck, 
when the mother sand came up, black, and smell- 
ing of the precious fluid. They are unimpressive, 
these oil derricks; the oil plant seems knocked 
together, improvised out of waste lumber and old 



72 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

pipes. The sense of pioneering is enhanced by so 
much being made out of so httle, made also with 
jhttle apparent excitement. The truth is that there 
is not very much excitement in pioneering. It is 
the normal job of the Middle-Westerner; adven- 
ture is his business; none see romance in the long, 
long trail when they come to set their foot upon it. 
It is part of the Middle- Western psychology that 
in the Tulsa World I should have found two col- 
umns of situations vacant and only half a column 
of people wanting situations. In spite of the 
Chicago slums, there is enough for everybody; 
that is the chief lesson of the Middle West. There 
is enough for every ambition, whether material or 
cultural; what the Middle West makes of its 
chances will inevitably, in virtue of its size, in virtue 
of its dominating novelty, be a simple thing; the 
civilization that the Middle West creates within 
the next fifty years will be the American civilization. 



Ill 

THE AMERICAN SCENE 

IT is not superfluous to repeat, before preparing 
an outline of the American character, that a 
Hfetime would not be too much for such a 
task, covering so many regions, such various 
races, temperaments, with three centuries of tra- 
dition, and new Americans whose fathers were 
Poles. So what I wish to say is in the nature of 
impression rather than conclusion, and I am pre- 
pared to be corrected by my own experience. But 
I do feel entitled to call the United States "God's 
own country." It is true that (according to the 
American Bankers' Association) 30 per cent of 
Americans aged fifty-five depend on their children 
or charity; that at the age of sixty-five no less 
than 54 per cent are thus unfortunate; it is true 
that the ravages of tuberculosis, the enormous 
divorce rate, compare with the schedule of Euro- 
pean miseries. Still, here is a favored land which, 
owing to its area and to its wealth, can give a 
chance to every young man, and, if it chooses, 
even to every young woman. All benefits have 



y4 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

been poured out upon America and America is 
using them as a cheerful prodigal; America is con- 
scious of her good fortune, and that is why she can 
afford the manifestation of pride which is called 
democracy. Democracy is the most arrogant of 
all forms; it is the converse of snobbery, for the 
snob conceives only superiors and inferiors. The 
snob is a man who thinks he has no equals, while 
the democrat is the man who thinks he has only 
equals. He is often mistaken in his view. 

And so a European thinks it picturesque and 
delightful to go to a bathing hut on a lake, ask 
for his bathing things, and hear a youth call out to 
his boss, "Say, where's this mans bathing suit?" 
To have a colored chambermaid stop him on the 
stairs and bluntly ask, "Where's your wife.?'* It is 
amusing, after the bent backs of the English serv- 
ant class, though I should add that these backs 
are bending less and less now. It is pleasing be- 
cause, like most things American, the democratic 
notion is cut out in sharp lines and painted in 
bright colors. The American fantasia, if I may so 
call it, is scarlet and gold. The scarlet of American 
excess creeps even into the pale blue of American 
sentimentality. Let not the reader conclude that 
I claim for England freedom from sentimentality; 
we, too, suffer greatly from what I may call emo- 
tion gone moldy. But England feels a little 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 75 

ashamed of her sentimentality, while America 
tends to account it as righteousness. The senti- 
mental attitude toward women, noblest and purest, 
I will say something of a little farther on. It some- 
times takes a strange lyrical form, particularly in 
the newspapers. And the newspapers matter, for 
the newspaper exhibition of the national character 
is the national character seen under a magnifying 
glass. The newspaper character is the national 
character — more so. For instance, I read in a news- 
paper that a certain lady has extraordinary cour- 
age, a keen sense of intuition, and a sublime faith 
in God. A very sagacious diagnosis inside a single 
interview. 

But sentimentality, which so naturally envelops 
the young bride, the good mother, the little child, 
takes in America some forms that interest me more. 
One of them is the sweet and simple life of million- 
aires. I am continually reading descriptions show- 
ing that the financial superman does not live on 
caviar off diamond-studded plates; that his subtle 
mind subsists upon the rudest fare and the highest 
thought; that he likes to set aside the nurture of 
his millions for a peaceful hour with Artemus 
Ward; that his true pleasure is serving in the local 
creche, teaching the creed that is called, "How to 
get on and yet be good." I like to think of the 
millionaire talking freely in the street to some one 



76 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

who owns rather less, and with a green watering- 
can assisting into beauty a Httle bed of marigolds. 

I think that impulse, which is purely American, 
arises from a desire to humanize the apparently 
inhuman. American business, shrewd as it is, 
seems to have a heart; it wants to do for in- 
dividual men the fair and the generous thing. 
The whole trend of American civilization is to- 
ward stressing the human factor; indeed, the 
word *'human" (in the sense of "friendl}^") is used 
in no other part of the English-speaking coun- 
tries. Also, a certain reverence attaches to power; 
reverence is always apparent in the American char- 
acter, curiously combined with irreverence. For 
instance, the magazine and novel continually pre- 
sent allusions to "the great surgeon" and **the 
great lawyer." The cynical European suspects that 
the great surgeon is a scrubby reactionary who does 
not read the medical journals; he views the great 
lawyer either as a foxy fee snatcher or as a tooth- 
less dodderer on the bench. But the American 
seems to invest these people with mental robes of 
ermine and scarlet. He is more easily impressed; 
his vision is more direct and less often leads him 
to doubt; where a European would doubt, an 
American often hates. 

You find this seriousness extending even to the 
most ignoble of occupations, the arts. In civilized 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 77 

countries the arts are, as a rule, merely the re- 
sounding kettles tied to the tails of the hounds 
that are hunting the great quarry of profit. But 
in an American newspaper you will see headlines 
such as this, " Playwright Finds His Inspiration in 
Lonely Sand Dunes." No European would be in- 
terested in the plajrwright's inspiration, except as 
an object for jeers. The American takes the arts 
seriously, just as he takes seriously the funds for 
the restoration of churches. He is altogether more 
literal; he uses the words "right" and "wrong," 
as to the meaning of which many Europeans have 
become rather shaky. He takes his tradition more 
seriously. For instance, in Chicago I observed a 
headline in the newspaper, "Cotton Exchange 
Fifty Years Old To-day." That has an irresistible 
charm. One need not, from the false vantage of 
the Oxford turf, smile at a record of fifty years; 
one envies, rather, the contentment so aroused. 
Then, once more, American complexity appears — 
I contrast this headline with the fact that in nearly 
every American city I have visited hotels and office 
buildings, erected round about 1900, are being 
pulled down to give place to buildings that shall 
be up-to-date. America delights in tradition, and 
destroys it as she goes. She hates the thing she 
respects, burns the god that she worships. Once 
more, here is a sign of the immense vitality of the 



78 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

land; you discover It best in the headlines of the 
newspapers. Here are a few which I collected : 
^'Ruth Up— Oh, Babe! She's a Ball Player." 
"Yo-ho! Postman Hooks a Man Eater." 
"Sisler Is Out Front to Stick." 
"Spooning Parlor at Union Church." 
"Bathers Stone Pastor Who Flayed Scanty 
Costumes." 

"Her Corking Face Lands Girl in Jail." 
You may laugh. You may protest that this is 
not America, that it is a libel on America; but the 
thing must be at least part of America if you sell 
a million a day of it. Moreover, it is not discred- 
itable. You may not like the following theatrical 
poster: 

GIGANTIC 

GATHERING OF 

GLORIOUS 

GIRLS IN 

GORGEOUS 

GOWNS. 

You may not like it any more than you like being 
told, a few weeks before the football season, that 
"the old pigskin is getting ready to peep over the 
horizon"; but all that, crude as it may sound. Is 
vital, and in the end all vital things make for the 
vague and unstable condition which some dare to 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 79 

call "good." It may be difficult to reconcile it 
with culture, until it is understood that culture 
arises not only from decadence; that all poets are 
not emaciated; that many, from Whitman to 
William Morris, have grown lyrical on women and 
on wine. 

Lyricism takes all forms. In the United States, 
one of the strangest from the European point of 
view is the adulation of business. As if America 
were reacting against the traditional adoration by 
England of the professions, she seems to set a 
peculiar value upon making, buying, and selling 
things. The Dignity of Business was written by an 
American, The Romance of Commerce was invented 
by another. To an extent this is a defense as well 
as an evangel, but it is certain that America has 
enshrined within business a portion of her romantic 
impulses. She respects the business man; while 
ready to give his due to the professional man, and 
more than his due to the artist, she intimately 
feels that business is the finest, as well as the most 
valuable, function of man; she perceives in the 
business man the qualities of a hero; in her view, 
he is doing the best that can be done by man. An 
evidence of this is the prevalence in the maga- 
zines, not only of business short stories (almost 
invariably concerned with smart selling), but of 
actual articles on business. In the SaHirday Eve- 



8o HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

ning Post I found an article on the role of the pur- 
chasing agent; in a single Issue of the American 
Magazine I found two business stories, and seven 
articles on business or interviews of big business 
men, total well over a third of the contributions. 
And these are not commercial journals, but popu- 
lar magazines. It seems to me that In this America 
performs a service; she is dragging down the 
wooden old traditions of cultured leisure and set- 
ting up instead an ideal which some may dislike, 
but which is a new ideal for new times. 

One of the first things that impressed me in 
America is expressed in a large board that stands 
on every road outside West Chester, Pennsylvania. 
On one side of the board we read as follows: 

THIS IS 

WEST CHESTER. 

COME RIGHT IN. 

GLAD TO SEE YOU. 

And on the other side: 

GOOD-BY. 

COME AGAIN. 

COME OFTEN. 

WEST CHESTER. 

This board enraged my American companion, 
who happened to be an American artist of the 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 8i 

highest order. He mouthed a furious denunciation 
of this "fradulent cordiality." At last I told him 
that he knew nothing about It, being merely an 
American, and that I could assure him that this 
sort of thing did mean something. It might not 
mean exactly what it said, for few human expres- 
sions do, but it did mean something. It repre- 
sents a dominant streak in the American character. 
It means what I have everywhere experienced — 
that America Is really hospitable, really sociable. 
Can anyone imagine an English village telling you 
to "Come right in".? An English village is not 
communicative enough even to tell you to get out, 
which at bottom Is its only emotion. In America 
the stranger is not welcomed in a purely mercantile 
spirit. The American wants trade, but he also 
wants to know things, to secure new impressions, 
and. If you will let him, he wants to like you. 
This combines with the old pioneer spirit into true 
hospitality. It may be thought that I am stressing 
the pioneer spirit, which seems to elucidate the 
Middle West, but I do believe that America still 
carries the pioneer habit of giving hospitality to all. 
I am not deceived by the reasons for this; the 
pioneer had not a warmer heart than anybody else; 
he gave hospitality because In pioneer days he had 
to give hospitality so as to enjoy it himself when 
in need. For many years in America you had to 



82 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

take hospitality or die on the prairie; that taught 
all men hospitality, and much of the tradition stays 
in the American spirit. That is why the stranger 
finds America so delightful. He is readily admitted 
into the American home, while he may spend a 
lifetime in France and be admitted only to a 
restaurant. 

I am perfectly sure that, on an average, the 
American is warmer hearted than the European. 
I have had many instances of this, and one of the 
most noteworthy was in New England. I am fond 
of country walks, which the American seems to 
dislike; his view of life is "automobiles to every- 
where and violent exercise at the week end." 
Therefore, the Americans who saw me trudging the 
roads were sorry for me, and only in two cases was 
I allowed to finish my walk undisturbed; in every 
other case total strangers in automobiles stopped 
and ofifered me a lift. I began by refusing, but in 
one case they looked offended, and, in the second, 
drove off hurriedly, obviously thinking me insane. 
Well, that means something; it means sympathy, 
while I am sure that any American can walk from 
Spain to Russia without being offered a lift, unless 
he asks for one, and then he might not get it. 

A fuller sense of the American affectionateness 
is found in the use of Christian names. It surprises 
the Englishman to find a clubroom greet a popular 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 83 

member with a shout of, "Hello, Jake!" At a party- 
he gets lost among the "Tommys" and the 
"Ogdens." Also he is puzzled by hearing people 
described as "lovely," or "beautiful." When he is 
promised the acquaintance of "a wonderful boy," 
it is rather a shock to meet an elderly banker. 
You may say this is superficial, that it means noth- 
ing, and that Tommy will skin Jake if he gets a 
chance; that may be, but there is in all things 
some reality, and I am sure that the American 
male friendships are very strong; strong, at least, 
so far as male friendships go. Even if this cor- 
diality is superficial, it does hold something warm, 
which you do not find in Europe. There is no bet- 
ter friend than an Englishman, if you can get him 
as a friend; but it is very difficult, and until you 
succeed he will stay on his guard. On the other 
hand, an American will take immense trouble over 
you, waste his time over you, drive you about, 
get you introductions, secure you privileges. Some- 
times this is ostentation, sometimes it is local pride; 
but human sentiments are always complex, and 
there runs through it an honest desire to oblige. 

You find this particularly in the American of the 
middle-sized towns. • New York is too large for 
anybody to be proud of; you cannot be town 
conscious in a city of that size, as you can be, for 
instance, in Cincinnati. The American is almost 



84 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

invariably proud and fond of his home town. He 
is always anxious that you should visit it; he will 
accompany you and show you round; you will 
offend him if you refuse to go and see the statue 
of Colonel Judson, who was killed at Saratoga. 
I am afraid that I have offended many people 
already by writing a book about America; nearly 
all those I have met felt that the book ought to be 
about their city, or at most about their state; I 
have been told everywhere that "to stay only three 
days here" was akin to crime. 

I take here the opportunity to explain that I 
have looked upon local interests as components of 
the general interest. Topeka may be a great city, 
but it is a great city only because it is an American 
city. It is difficult to explain these things, because 
the American seems to take them in a rather per- 
sonal way. He appeals to you personally, and 
takes your response in the same way. The per- 
sonal appeal, which embarrasses many a European, 
is to me unfailingly attractive. I like the sign near 
railroad crossings, reading, "Stop, Look, Listen." 
At St. Louis I was delighted to be told, on the trol- 
ley-car standards, "Don't Jay Walk; Cross at 
Crossing." I felt that I was picked out from among 
the other jay walkers. This increased my vanity, 
and everybody knows that the enhancement of 
one's vanity is the main purpose of one's life. 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 85 

Besides, there is again a certain warmth In this 
picking out; It is an extreme case to find this 
warmth even In hotels. At one of these, for In- 
stance, I was every day presented with a morning 
paper bearing a label, "This Is your paper." I 
know this meant only two or three cents, but 
the way it was done Is attractive, familiar; I was 
being remembered, and one need not seek false 
emotion in what is mainly kindness. 

Kindness Is almost universal in America; in my 
first three months I collected only three delib- 
erate rudenesses, though, doubtless, I deserved 
many more. I found everywhere assistance and, 
what the stranger needs so much, information. 
Sometimes I found a little too much, for the 
American does not always realize how lost Is the 
stranger in this Immense, complicated system, and 
so burdens him with detail. The American Is often 
quiet, but he never refuses conversation, and, on 
the whole, it is better that people should talk too 
much than too little; this contributes to general 
sociability and ease of intercourse. Also, conversa- 
tion helps a man to exhibit himself. Very few of 
us ever attempt to discover what the other man 
thinks; we talk so as to assert to him what we 
think; this helps us to discover what we really 
think. I suspect that the American, more than 
any other kind of man, his mind being filled with 



86 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

a vast number of physical Impressions, needs con- 
versation to sort out these Impressions. Burdened 
by certain forms of national pride, local pride, and 
personal pride, by old puritanic views and new 
efficiency views, by sentiment and by ruthlessness, 
he needs conversation as a sort of clearing house. 
He has to formulate. 

In Europe we do not formulate much; that job 
was done for us long ago by our family, our class, 
our school, our university. Most Europeans know 
what they think, and few of them think much. 
The American collects so much more, and so Indis- 
criminately, that he needs a process of elimination. 
He needs to tell you that he believes a thing so as 
to learn to doubt It. For Instance, one often meets 
an elderly American who explains that a lazy 
young man cannot live In America, that he is 
looked down upon, and that the best he can do is 
to get out of the country. He then goes on to 
explain that Americans work sixteen hours a day 
and cast the proceeds of their labor into the laps 
of the noblest and purest women in the world. 
He means all that, as he says it. He really believes 
there is no jeunesse doree in the New York clubs. 
He believes that no business man golfs on Saturday 
morning. He believes that the women, of whom 
in Chicago alone, last year, thirty-seven thousand 
were married and six thousand divorced, are the 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 87 

noblest and purest women in the world. He be- 
lieves it — until he tells you so. Then, unless habit 
overwhelms him, he settles down into decent doubt. 
When he criticizes his own country, he is weighing 
it, unless again patriotic exaltation has become a 
habit. Sometimes it has, though I have met very 
little spread-eagleism in America. Possibly spread- 
eagleism was politely concealed; possibly, too, the 
praises I have heard of English liberalism, English 
culture, and English tradition amount to courteous 
sympathy with the aged that once were great. I 
do not know. The only real spread-eagle I met, 
who told me that in America, schools, hospitals, 
and courts of law were beyond the dreams of 
Europe, was a galvanized American. These con- 
verts, you know! Still, I did meet a lyrical spread- 
eagle once. He was, he told me, an Elk. 

I did not quite know what was an Elk, or a 
Knight of Columbus. I gathered they were friendly 
societies, but not quite in the English sense. So, 
having heard of this particular specimen, I stalked 
my Elk. He was a middle-aged man in a decent 
way of business, whose function in my life was to 
get me in seven minutes to an Elevated station 
which required a walk of nine. As we ran, I inter- 
rupted his conversation, which was on Kansas City, 
lead pencils, women, and divinity, and said to him, 
"What is an Elk.?" A change came over him. 



88 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

A dignity arose. He said, "Sir, the Elks are a body 
of men banded together to assert the principles of 
humanity and justice that have made this country 
great." I said, "Yes; but how do they do it.?" 
He said: "Sir, the answer Is simple enough. The 
Elks uphold in this great country the traditions of 
benevolence, brotherhood, and mutual help which 
have given rise to the American spirit." I said, 
"Yes; but how do they do It .?" With an Inflection 
of impatience and pain, the Elk replied, "Sir, the 
Star-spangled Banner that waves over these lands, 
and the name of the Bird of Freedom, should indi- 
cate to you that the pursuit of good morals, the 
maintenance of the principles of purity, of public 
spirit, social service, are within the compass of the 
Elks, and account for the position and progress of 
this great free democracy." I said, "Yes; but 
how do they do it.?" "This is your station," said 
the Elk, and hurled me on to a sooty stairway. I 
shall have to find another Elk, but this one is 
precious to me in a way. He does represent some- 
thing that is fundamental In all races — namely, 
lyricism. He represents the intoxication of suc- 
cess, the materialization of the efl^ects of material 
comfort. One thinks oneself great because one is 
big, and, Instead of explaining, one proclaims. 

Nearly all Americans will, to a certain extent, 
proclaim, if you talk to them about America. I 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 89 

have met a few Americans who criticized America, 
but they nearly all belonged to the intellectual 
class, which does nothing but intellectualize. Those 
people take a queer pleasure in running down 
America. They vaunt the culture of France and 
the courtesy of Spain; they read no American 
books, but criticize them all the same. They are 
few, while the mass of Americans who openly boost 
their country is large. Many of them will criticize 
America in a temperate spirit, and, more and more, 
I suspect, the educated American is reacting 
against certain features of American civilization, 
such as haste and noise. One thing in him is note- 
worthy — he is always willing to discuss America. 
He will state her, explain her, defend her, and the 
subject never wearies him. That is a profound 
difference with the Englishman, who, confronted 
with a foreigner, is more likely to talk to him about 
the foreign land — that is, if he must. The Eng- 
lishman would rather stick to safe topics, such as 
games, or London communications, but if he is 
dragged into national discussions he will avoid 
England. It is not that he lacks national pride, 
but that pride has become to him a habit of mind. 
He is really more arrogant than the American, 
for the American takes the trouble to speak for his 
country, and proclaims as an argument, "I am an 
American citizen." The Englishman is much 



90 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

worse. He does not trouble to proclaim, ''I am a 
British subject." He expects you to know that, 
and at bottom does not care whether you know 
it or not, or what you say about it. The English- 
man's complacency is immense: First, there is the 
Church-of-England God ; then there is the English- 
man; then there is the Englishman's bulldog; then 
there is nothing. So, realizing this, I am not 
with those who are offended by the occasionally 
loud American patriotism; I know only too well 
that its occasional loudness means that America 
doubts itself. 

England proclaims her nationality less than any 
other country in the world, and she values it more 
unconsciously than any other country because in 
England everything is so old established that new 
things do not matter. That is why our naturaliza- 
tion is so easy, while nowadays in America it takes 
upon itself the airs of ceremony. Some time ago 
in St. Louis, at Judge Gook's court, twenty-one 
aliens out of thirty-four were refused American 
citizenship; one, because he had deserted his fam- 
ily; another, because he had deserted his ship; 
a third, because he had been in a race riot; an- 
other, because he had kept a saloon open on Sun- 
day, etc. No foreigner may comment on this, for 
a country has the exclusive right to decide whom 
it will admit as a citizen. It interests me, how- 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 91 

ever, as an evidence of the price which Americans 
set upon American citizenship. Citizenship here 
has lyrical value, whereas, in Europe, it has only 
practical value. 

The naturalization method of America suggests 
that a sort of honor is being conferred upon a man 
when he is admitted to citizenship. No doubt 
many jingo Europeans would understand this emo- 
tion, which is foreign to me, but it may be that 
here we find a faint indication of the craving for 
distinction which Is so strong in the United States. 
It is commonplace to describe the American am- 
bassador at a continental reception, distinguishing 
himself from among the uniforms and the decora- 
tions by the Spartan democracy of his evening 
suit. America has made a virtue of this evening 
suit, but I do not think she likes it. Seventeen 
seventy-six was the hot fit of democracy and long 
before 1920 the cold fit came. For many years 
Americans have shown how much they missed the 
satisfactions called "honors" which are given in all 
other countries. It is natural that men should 
desire honors; it may be stupid, but It is natural; 
the English are frantic with desire to place behind 
their names alphabets made up of M.P., D.S.O., 
J. P., F.R.G.S.; It is a satisfaction to the great- 
grandnephew of the fourth son of an Italian count 
to call himself a count; honors are a marvelous 



92 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

means to orderly government. In America the 
need has shown itself through the many marriages 
of American girls to members of various aristo- 
cratic European families. It is something to get 
wealth, but it is not quite enough; the natural 
vanity of man does not thrive on wealth alone. 
That is why the Americans have invented a num- 
ber of social ranks. 

Business titles are given in America more readily 
than in England. Men are distinguished by being 
called '* president" of a corporation. I know one 
president whose staff consists of two typists. Many 
firms have four "vice presidents." Or there is a 
"press representative," or a "purchasing agent.'* 
In the magazines you seldom find merely an editor; 
the others need their share of honor; so they are 
"associate" (not "assistant") editors. A dentist 
is called "doctor." The hotel valet is a "tailor." 
Magistrates of police courts are "judges," instead 
of merely Mr. I wandered into a university, 
knowing nobody, and casually asked for the dean. 
I was asked, "Which dean.f*" In that building 
there were enough deans to stock all the English 
cathedrals. The master of a secret society is 
"royal supreme knight commander." Perhaps I 
reached the extreme at a theater in Boston, where I 
wanted something, I forget what, and was told that 
I must apply to the chief of the ushers. He was a 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 93 

mild little man, who had something to do with peo- 
ple getting Into their seats, rather a come-down 
from the pomp and circumstance of his title. Grow- 
ing Interested, I examined my program, with the fol- 
lowing result: It Is not a large theater, but it has 
a press representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), 
an assistant treasurer (box-office junior clerk), an 
advertising agent, our old friend the chief of the 
ushers, a stage manager, a head electrician, a mas- 
ter of properties (In England called "props"), a 
leader of the orchestra (pity this — why not presi- 
dent?), and a matron (occupation unknown). 

What does this mean In American psychology? 
It means that here, as elsewhere, mankind comes 
to believe In Itself only by asserting Itself, by deco- 
rating Itself with high-sounding names. This Is 
the efflorescence of the human ego, the manifesta- 
tion of the adorable childishness of man, which 
holds its sway under the pinions of the Bird of 
Freedom, just as much as before the indifferent 
eyes of the Lion and the Unicorn. It is an evidence 
of the innocence, the splendid capacity for taking 
clear-cut views, which may give young America 
the leadership, If not the hegemony, of the world. 

I had not heard much about the soul until I 
came to America. In England the soul is an un- 
derstood thing, to be taken out on Sunday for ex- 
ercise; even then It has to behave, to be less 



94 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

evident than one's shadow. To expose one's soul 
is in England looked upon as a minor indecency. 
Even our magazine writers tend to let it alone, and 
cause heroes to love heroines from the bottom of 
their hearts; in the American magazine passion 
often goes a little deeper. Of course, in America 
the soul takes peculiar forms; it does not come 
out as an ordinary Christian soul, but rather as a 
modern soul, an up-to-date soul. I do not want to 
seem irreverent, or to poke poor fun, but when in 
New England one discovers a small town called 
Mystic, one feels that the soul is going too far. 

For the soul, in its new form of mysticism, and 
its occasional form of spooks, is a rather comic 
character. Instead of being merely a life essence 
it becomes militant, it proselytizes, burgeons into 
new religions, into forms of higher thought, into 
silence guilds, "national'* faiths, etc. Extraor- 
dinary attempts are made to reconcile with a semi- 
revealed religion the discoveries of what is called 
science. This is profoundly offensive to "science," 
which hates to be called by that vague name, and 
would prefer to see religion reconciled with biology. 
Consider spiritualism, for instance, and its ex- 
traordinary success, so great that at a certain 
moment American industry was unable to meet the 
demand for ouija boards. I know nothing about 
spiritualism, but it is repulsive to my intellect that 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 95 

it should be possible for a jovial party of hardware 
merchants' wives in Jacksonville to call up for a 
conversation the spirit of Napoleon. It is repulsive 
to one's intellect because it is incongruous, and, if 
it were true. It would make the after-life even more 
intolerable than the actual life fortified by the tele- 
phone. The whole thing is pervaded with fakes 
which have been exposed again and again; the rest 
may be true, but what is interesting is not the ac- 
ceptance of spiritualism by so many people; it is 
the attempt to explain it. Still more remarkable is 
the attempt to deduce for moral guidance some les- 
sons from the communications out of the unseen. 
Reconciliation with scientific fact is generally ex- 
asperating to the person who has had any contact 
with scientific training. I have been quietly told 
that spiritualistic force is akin to electricity, and 
when I have asked, "What is electricity.^" I have 
received no answer I could understand. There is a 
certain type of mystic that whirls itself into intoxi- 
cation by piling up words such as moron, endo- 
plasm, phagocyte, dissociation, subliminal, etc. It 
sounds scientific. In fact it is gibberish. 

Likewise, love. Most Europeans look upon love 
as a comparatively simple and temporary reaction, 
which leaves behind it a certain sediment called 
aflFection. According to temperament, they look 
upon love as a regrettable physical excess, or as a 



96 ' HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

natural desire for Intimacy with a person of the 
other sex; or as a joke; or an act of business; but 
they very seldom look upon It as a sacrament. In 
America, I am not so sure of the men. The men 
do not talk much about love, and I have a suspicion 
that they do not place it on quite so lofty a plane 
as their women would desire. It is not in the nature 
of men to grow rhapsodic over anything; all great 
rhapsodies, it is true, have come from men, but 
always from unusual men; the ordinary man has 
a way of placing love and Its consequences among 
the material facts of life; in Europe the women 
hold only slightly more refined views. But In 
America certain peculiarities appear in the concep- 
tion of love which the American woman proclaims. 
(What actual conception she holds, as against the 
one she proclaims, may be a matter for further 
discussion.) The things that people proclaim are 
quite as important as the things they believe, be- 
cause what people say to you is not always what 
they think, but what they would like to think, or 
what they would like you to think they think. The 
American woman's proclamation of the nature of 
love may be the proclamation of what she thinks 
love ought to be. Now from America came the 
phrase, "Divinity of Sex." It is a phrase that I 
cannot understand; I can discover in sex beauty, 
lyricism, exaltation, all that is delightful, much 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 97 

that leads to generosity — I can discover all that, 
except "spirituality," or "divinity." I suspect 
that the words, "Divinity of Sex," merely express 
the fact that the American woman sets upon her- 
self a price higher than does the European. When 
giving herself in marriage to a man she appears to 
lay down that she is doing something significant, 
which honors him by preferment and her by self- 
sacrifice. Also, she conveys that she is the cradle 
of the race, forgetting that nature is so arranged 
as to demand that a masculine hand shall rock this 
cradle. It seems to be set up that "love" is won- 
derful; that "the child" is wonderful; that "the 
race" is wonderful; In other words, exaltation. 
Whether this is wholly sincere or wholly insincere 
does not matter very much; the American man 
hardly ever echoes the point of view, but he never 
controverts it; he maintains silence and seems to 
accept the feminine theory. I wonder. . . . Per- 
haps he does not care. 

But, leaving aside for the moment this sex con- 
ception. It is Interesting to observe certain bizarre 
intellectual forms that have arisen in America. 
They are more self-conscious than ours. In Eu- 
rope, the William Blakes and the Maeterllncks 
arise more spontaneously than they do in America, 
because the surrounding atmosphere is hostile or 
wholly callous. A European mystic has little honor 



98 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

in his own country; his countrymen are never 
quite sure whether he is a genius or a lunatic. In 
America, he finds swift acceptance; his mysticism 
takes upon itself the appearance of reality, because 
many Americans are seeking mystical expression. 
Consider, for instance, the following extract from 
an extraordinary document, now in my possession, 
and published at Los Angeles: 

The Psychological Solution of Wars. 

An interpretation of the American religion of the new 
civilization, the foremost representative of which is Dr. 
Julia Seton. 

Cosmic dynamics. 

Dynamic metaphysics. 

To win the war the cosmic way, 

Set minds to win the war that way. . . . 

That is not an isolated document, nor do I sup- 
pose that it originates from a lunatic asylum. It 
is merely the most remarkable among a number of 
instances I have taken from books, stories, and 
pamphlets. It is an intoxication of words, of which 
you can find instances even in best sellers, such as 
Diane of the Green Van. I have a manuscript be- 
fore me supposed to be a short story, by a per- 
fectly sane American college girl. On the first 
page I find the word "cosmic," twice; the word 
"dynamic," three times; the word "co-ordinate," 
once; the word "universal," once; the word 
"harmony," three times. This produces a certain 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 99 

type of literature with a limited number of words. 
Thus: "universal harmony," "cosmic universal- 
ity," "dynamic co-ordination," "co-ordinated har- 
mony," etc. In other words, jargon. Now, what 
does that mean ? I have the greatest respect for the 
American powers of organization, for much of 
American literature; I realize quite well that 
William James, Mr. Theodore Dreiser, Mr. Edison, 
Mr. Arthur Brisbane, many thousands of people, 
exhibit variously high forms of intellect. One 
might make a similar list of English names, but the 
difference is that In Europe we have only two 
classes — the Intellectual class, and the class which 
does not aspire to intellect — while America has 
both, and also a third class — the class which aspires 
to intellectual production or understanding. That 
class produces those extraordinary literary med- 
leys; it finds divinity In the sex emotion, and not 
in the hunger emotion, though these are of the 
same kind; it aspires to contact with an impalpa- 
ble world, or to some removed and exquisite way 
of life. Mixed up in this vertigo of words are all 
sorts of intelligent ideas, ideas on democracy, on 
birth control, on poetry, house decoration, etc. 
The intellectual river rushes Into every back water, 
causing frightful confusion. Well, that means 
something in American psychology. 

To me, this impulse toward "cosmic orders," 



loo HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

and so forth, Indicates a reaction In the American 
mind against the mechanical cIvIHzatlon of which 
I must say something in another chapter. The 
reaction Is highly self-conscious. For Instance, a 
little while ago a woman said to me that a visit to 
Rome might be expensive, but that "It went to 
cultural background." That Is self-conscious. The 
American seems, more than other men, Inclined to 
face his intellectual processes. His moral processes 
he does not face with any such courage, but his 
intellectual processes Interest him; whereas the 
European Is extraordinarily afraid of self-knowl- 
edge because this might lead him Into Ideas. A 
number of Americans, of late years, have come to 
revolt against the old Ideas of "do no wrong, but 
be God-fearing"; and "get on or get out." The 
first has failed them because it was a purely moral 
idea which did not content the growing Intellectual 
ferment produced by scores of thousands of college 
graduates, male and female, who had taken in their 
culture very quickly In enormous and rather Indis- 
criminate doses; the second idea of "get on or get 
out" also failed to satisfy them, because their 
contact with culture, without teaching them that 
culture was enough, had taught them that me- 
chanical civilization was not enough. Hence this 
rush Into any Intellectual road, and, therefore. Into 
any intellectual blind alley. All Intellectual move- 



THE AMERICAN SCENE loi 

ments are rebellious movements, but some of them, 
such as the English and the French intellectual 
movements, are so old established that they have 
become traditional rebels against power and ma- 
terialism; in America, where the intellectual tradi- 
tion is young, they are still in natural reaction 
against surrounding materialism. Therefore, they 
are good things. 

Many European intellectuals sneer at the "cos- 
mic harmony," but the fact remains that the argo- 
nauts are trying to do something. Some of them 
are trying to produce works of art, by using the 
language of the laboratory; others are seeking a 
precision in life, an aspiration which they can no 
longer obtain from the Christian simplicity; yet 
others are trying to project the aloof doctrines of 
philosophy and metaphysics into a practical realm 
which shall have application to their lives. If the 
result is so often hasty, hectic, incoherent, it is 
largely because the surrounding atmosphere is so 
favorable, because the Americans are, more than 
any other human beings, interested in ideas. In 
Europe, a man with an idea is, on the whole, a 
nuisance; if his idea is practical, he may be sent to 
jail; if unpractical, he will be put into the comic 
papers. But in America, in either case, he will be 
listened to. He will find his public and his party. 
That is good for him because it enables him to 



I02 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

express himself; but It Is bad for him because he 
finds, ready made, an appreciation which In Eu- 
rope he would have to tear from reluctant and 
sluggish minds; in the Intellectual sense, America 
is perhaps the only place of which It can be said 
that a prophet sometimes has honor In his own 
country. 

The easy acceptance of the fantastic literature I 
have quoted may arise from the general American 
tendency to excess. The whole of the American 
civilization seems to me willfully, and often splen- 
didly, excessive. The people seem to find a pleasure 
in the height of their buildings. In the size of their 
restaurants. The freak dinner, for Instance, where 
a musical prodigy was concealed in a bush of roses 
and revealed only when cofi"ee was served, where 
every guest was presented with a gift worth one 
thousand dollars, Is not only an Indication of reck- 
less wealth, but also of a deliberate desire to do 
things largely, magnificently, excessively. 

One discovers this In the lavish magnificence of 
American hospitality. It Is delightful, but to a 
pallid European it sometimes proves exhausting. 
One rides to too many places In too many automo- 
biles; one meets too many Interesting people; vis- 
Its to the opera, to the theater, to the country club, 
to the famous view over the valley — all this, so 
kindly, so generous. Is part of the American tend- 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 103 

ency to do too much, too fast. They do not think 
that they themselves suffer from it, but I suspect 
that much of the sensitiveness of American pubHc 
opinion to newspaper stunts is due to an over- 
stimulated condition of the nerves. Excess brings 
its penalty in the shape of reaction. The noise 
of America, the swift movement, the passion for 
automobiles, a passion so violent that people mort- 
gage their house to buy one — all this is excess. 

I have been in American towns of less than 
twenty thousand inhabitants, and found them 
closely modeled upon the big towns. The big towns 
provide excess for the millions; the little towns, 
excess for the thousands. It is merely a matter of 
proportion. Sometimes one does not know how to 
behave. The Englishman is not accustomed to 
the spaciousness of American hospitality. Amer- 
ican hospitality will explain the difference between 
watermelon, honey dew, and casaba, while English 
hospitality consists in letting the lunch lie about 
for you to eat if you like. We are not accustomed 
to being shown a house in detail — the labor-saving 
appliances at work; told the story of the pieces of 
furniture, of the pictures. The Americans are 
never weary of this, because their vitality is enor- 
mous. It is not only nerves which permit them to 
do so many things in a single day; it is not only 
their magnificent climate, which is bright and brae- 



I04 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

ing like champagne; it is the rude strength of a race 
not yet sophisticated; it is the hunger for impres- 
sions of a race just entering into possession of its 
powers. Hunger and innocence, this defines a vast 
tract of the American mind. 

An idea of this tendency to excess can be found 
in the advertisements of the newspapers. Adver- 
tisements are never very discreet, but they always 
adjust themselves to the taste of the public. The 
specialist soon finds out if the advertisement is a 
success; if it fails it is changed. Consider the 
two following extracts from advertisements. One 
recommends a short story called Two and the Sil- 
ver Creese, and reads as follows: 

Gosh! if you want tensity, read Two and the Silver Creese, 
a Moro love story by Donald Francis McGrew. When a 
Moro loves he does it in a 2i2°-Fahr. fashion, as you'll dis- 
cover when you read this little asbestos romance. Don't read 
this near the stove. 

Here is the second: 

Scrub up your smoke decks and cut for a new pipe deal! — 
Say, you'll have a streak of smoke luck that '11 put pep in 
YOUR smoke-motor, all right, if you'll ring-in with a jimmy 
pipe or the papers and nail some . . . for packing! Just 
between ourselves, you never will wise-up to high-spot- 
smoke-joy until you can call a pipe or a home-rolled cigarette 
by its first name, then, to hit the peak-of-pleasure you land 
square on that two-fisted-man-tobacco . . . Well, sir, you'll 
be so all-fired happy you'll want to get a photograph of 
yourself breezing up the pike with your smoke-throttle wide 
open! Talk about smoke-sport! 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 105 

The reader will say, as perhaps he has said be- 
fore: "This is very unfair; you pick out of our 
newspapers the most blatant headlines of the most 
ferocious advertisements, and then you say that 
indicates the American mentality. Allow me to 
tell you, sir, that in this country there are millions 
of sober, educated people who, equally with you, 
feel that — ^," etc. Which is quite true; a country 
which was wholly occupied in scrubbing up its 
smoke decks would not be a success, but it is 
equally true that this sort of appeal must corre- 
spond with a demand of the American mentality — 
vh.j the demand for lyricism, which takes the form 
of rhetoric and vituperation. 

An unfortunate result of this violent stimulation 
is the national restlessness. I am no enemy of 
stimulation; indeed, I believe that it is better to 
be too much stimulated than not stimulated at all, 
but one can overdo it. I have several times re- 
ferred to the automobile, and you may think that 
I am an old-fashioned partisan of the stagecoach, 
which is not the case. It is good to see that the 
American city has emancipated itself from the 
horse, but I do believe that the automobile is hav- 
ing an evil effect upon the country. It has made 
the center of some towns almost uninhabitable. 
Before a window on North Michigan Boulevard in 
Chicago, three thousand automobiles pass every 



io6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

hour. The night is filled with mechanical sounds; 
the throttles are open; the automobiles are parked 
outside hotels, and the engines allowed to run; it 
is like sleeping in a garage. The streets are clotted; 
in Fifth Avenue, for instance, between four and 
half past five, any fat old lady will walk six blocks 
while a vehicle passes two. The automobile, at 
certain hours, is making the traffic of Manhattan 
unmanageable. It will drive the city of New York 
into the immensely costly expedient of cutting un- 
derground motor roads in the rock, or to the more 
revolutionary method of building elevated roads 
over the old elevated railways and over certain 
cross-streets. All that because scores of thousands 
of people want to get about. Watch the line of auto- 
mobiles in the afternoon, near, let us say, the New 
York Public Library; not one in ten is a commercial 
vehicle. You will say that this is luxurious New 
York, but I have seen the same thing in little 
towns of New England, in St. Louis, in Kansas 
City. Traffic is mostly composed of people who 
are getting about for excessive pleasure or hardly 
necessary business. This leads one to the conclu- 
sion that America is getting about to too many 
places, trying to handle in one day too many jobs, 
and in one night too many pleasures. 

A motor-car run after breakfast, a heavy morn- 
ing's work, a business lunch party, an excited after- 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 107 

noon's work, dinner at a restaurant, a theater, a 
supper party, a dance, or a run through the moon- 
Hght in the inevitable automobile! I do not pre- 
tend that this is the everyday life of every New- 
Yorker, but it is the life to which most of the 
modern New-Yorkers, rich and poor, seem to 
aspire. And it seems to be speed for the sake of 
speed. I have before me an envelope of the Postal 
Telegraph Cable Company; it bears two mottoes: 
"Special Rush Service," and, "It Will Hurry Your 
Answer to Give It to the Boy Who Delivers This 
Telegram." You will say telegrams generally are 
in a hurry, but what interests me is the emphasis 
laid upon haste. This leads to overstrain, and may 
perhaps lead to hardness. When one has no time 
one is not gentle, and if the American (honor be to 
him) did not cultivate gentleness, his would indeed 
be a ruthless country. 

Anyone who thinks that I exaggerate will find 
confirmation of these remarks in the reactions 
which appear in America herself against certain 
sides of her life. For instance, the other day, in 
the Metropolitan Magazine, I read a story where the 
hero gave a melancholic account of a horrible week- 
end, where he was taken by his hostess for meals 
and parties to all the surrounding houses. He was 
protesting. Likewise, in the Saturday Evening Post, 
I found a story called "The Silken Bully," which 



io8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

charges the American woman with brutal selfish- 
ness, lawlessness, and exploitation of her husband. 
I do not indorse these two stories, but would ob- 
serve that these magazines are very popular, have 
a large circulation, and do not want to antagonize 
it. Therefore, I am entitled to conclude that there 
exists a protest in America against dominating 
women, and also against restlessness and haste. 
Of women we must say something a little farther 
on; as regards restlessness, I would only add that 
I have met many Americans who deplore the ex- 
cessive activity which pervades their country. 
They say that in America there is no time to live. 
I do not go so far, but then I am a European, and 
am so impressed by our sluggishness that I am glad 
to see America overdoing it a little. That may be 
better than not doing it at all. 

There are also against the national restlessness 
personal reactions of another kind; one of the most 
interesting is the new type of cultured American. 
The older type of cultured American was in a way 
more American than the new. He was still con- 
nected with Emerson and Longfellow; he had 
strong moral sentiments; he was rather ceremoni- 
ous, and, on the whole, rather academic. Mr. 
Bernard Shaw makes an amusing caricature of cer- 
tain sides of this type in Alan and Superman; an 
admirable portrait can be found in The American^ 




THE NATIONAL RESTLESSNESS MAKES FOR A GAYETY AND CHARM OF 

ITS OWN 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 109 

by Henry James. The remarkable fact about that 
type was that one could never imagine him as a 
young man. He was always a well-preserved man 
of forty-five. Well, there has been a reaction, a 
modernization. One of the reasons is that during 
the last fifty years so many people grew rich that 
they were able to send their sons to college; that in 
the last twenty years business threw aside the idea 
expounded by Mr. Lorimer's hero in The Letters of 
a Self-made Merchant to His Son, that a young 
man was ruined for business by a college education. 
I have met many Yale men in business, and a 
fair number from Harvard. The most remarkable 
of all was employed in a large corporation. He 
was young, but had a good position. As we came 
in he stood up, perfectly dressed in a suit of gray 
tweed, wearing spats over admirable boots. As I 
observed his quiet blue tie and well-laundered 
collar, his close-cut, but not too close-cut hair, as 
he welcomed us in a rather high and unmodulated 
voice, I thought, "I have never seen anything quite 
like this." We talked. At twenty-eight he had 
still the undergraduate touch; he did not take 
himself seriously, as did the old type. He did not 
talk about the size and power of his corporation, as 
the old type did, out of vanity or nervousness. He 
was an ordinary "nice fellow," just any negligent 
sophomore. But, a little later, we talked business, 



no HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

and the man changed; he grew grave; his mouth 
hardened; I saw something in his eyes which told 
me that he was poHshed only as a sword is polished, 
that he had what an Oxford man seldom has, an 
American cutting edge. Here America is produc- 
ing a high type of humanity, and she will produce it 
more and more, as wealth learns to value good breed- 
ing. It will combine the graces of the Old World 
with the force of the New World. I have had only 
a glimpse of the superman, but I feel that he will 
give a great account of himself in the times to come. 
And this is not an isolated instance. A day or 
two at Harvard, conversation with twenty or 
thirty young men, reveals something more impor- 
tant than knowledge; it exhibits charming natural 
manners, modesty, firmness. I wish every English 
visitor could spend twelve hours at Harvard or 
Yale; it would enable him to avoid the absurd 
generalizations he often makes. As an American 
put it to me, *' England compares her best with 
America's worst," which is absolutely true. Not 
only does the Englishman set up as a standard his 
own county families, conveniently forgetting Eng- 
land's profiteers, England's lower middle class, the 
mincing gentility of the antimacassar, the bawling 
taprooms of our country hotels, but he compares 
the English gentleman class with any braggart 
salesman who talks to him in the club car. 



THE AMERICAN SCENE iii 

It is lamentable because It Is so stupid, lamenta- 
ble because a few dinner parties or week-ends in 
American homes would show the Englishman that 
America has a gentleman class akin to his own, in 
Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Virginia, even New 
York, which did not come over (steerage) last 
week, which does not struggle for money, does not 
ask personal questions, does not boast — a class 
which discusses without puritanism any subject 
you like, accepts your eccentricities, cherishes its 
traditions without obtruding them, indeed, a class 
which diflferentiates itself from the English county 
families, to which it is generally related, by a 
keenness, an openness to new ideas which should 
sting the self-complacency and stir the dust where 
lie the English families among the debris of Vic- 
torianism. 

All the same, certain things startle one in Amer- 
ica; one of them is the occasional outbreak of 
puritanism. For instance, when my agent was 
booking my lecture tour, he issued a prospectus 
provided with my photograph. A woman's club 
which had applied for a lecture date refused to 
engage me because my photograph exhibited me in 
a dressing gown which exposed my neck. This is 
quite true; they put it in writing. I suspect that 
this exhibits one of those deep-buried, puritanic 
American strains; when I think of that, I smile at 



112 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

the remark so often made that "America has no 
traditions." America has a profound ethical tradi- 
tion. She has created in her own mind an aris- 
tocracy of God-fearing men and women. She still 
tends to estimate people according to their morals. 
So does England; but England tries to shut her 
eyes to what may be inconvenient because that 
makes trouble, while America feels it her duty to 
inquire; in other words, the American seems more 
preoccupied with moral questions than is the Euro- 
pean. I do not represent the European as a gay 
and vicious man; I know him too well. England 
has her Vigilance Society, and France her League 
for Repressing the Vices of the Streets, just as 
America has her Society for the Suppression of 
Vice. Mr. Comstock completed a trinity with Sir 
Percy Bunting and Mr. Beranger, but in America 
virtue is not so completely given over to special- 
ists. Virtue is everybody's business. I have dis- 
covered, notably, that in a club of men, where a 
member drinks, gambles, and runs after women, 
that member is not called *'no end of a dog," as 
he would be in England, or well liked, as he would 
be in France; in America he is deplored; you 
will generally find that in America it is virtue, 
not vice, earns a man popularity. This is not 
entirely a matter of repression; I do not know 
about this question as much as I should like, but if 



THE AMERICAN SCENE 113 

things are what they seem, America is a virtuous 
country. Though things never are what they seem. 

The outside shows the American rather more 
Hke the EngHshman of i860, with a dash of 
Nietzsche, than hke the Englishman of to-day. He 
is domestic, and seems to care deeply for his home, 
his wife, and children; he talks about them, in- 
stead of keeping them In the background, and he 
very seldom hints at irregular adventures. 

Domesticity is part of the American Insularity; 
it is due to the fact that most of the country lies 
so far from the sea that external influences do not 
operate. And yet I find it difficult to believe that 
the American is as moral as he seems. He could 
not keep it up. The 1910 census showed 6 per 
cent of illiterates; Senator Borah stated, in 1917, 
that 70 per cent of American families were living 
below the poverty line; the disease records, as 
quoted by Doctor Biggs, are terrifying. America 
is not worse off than Europe; indeed, she is better 
off, but in conditions like these it is impossible for 
national morality to be as high as is made out. 

One has a glimpse of that now and then. I have 
before me a publication which I will call the 
"Underside." Here I find reports of sexual crimes, 
advertisements of shops where they sell "books on 
sex questions," pictures of "girls In artistic poses." 
I find a publication which enables men and women 



114 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

to make "friends" by advertisement. There are 
books "exposing" white slavery, and even "in- 
structions for the honeymoon." All this stirs in 
the middle of the drink question, among advertise- 
ments of proof testers and stills, which are offered — 
you will never guess — to people who want to make 
distilled water. 

That sort of thing, which you find in every city, 
suggests the secret escape from moral restrictions. 
The newspapers report a great many sexual crimes; 
this slough which I stir up reveals that in America, 
still more than in England, vice goes slinking and 
ashamed, but goes all the same. I find chaos and 
conflict. The Federation of New Jersey Women's 
Clubs demands official action to lengthen frocks 
and to stop cheek-to-cheek dancing; the Federa- 
tion of New York Women's Clubs demands the 
removal of legal restrictions on birth control. 

I doubt the thoroughness of American puritan- 
ism. I have come across a number of men who 
supported prohibition, and their cellars are full of 
liquor. Perhaps that is why they could afford the 
gesture. I have been over the Library of Congress 
at Washington, and discovered that this great in- 
stitution possesses only one book of Anatole 
France, the mildest of all. Between the surface 
and the depths I hesitate. But these are only im- 
pressions; it is not my business to pronounce. 



IV 

THE AMERICAN WOMAN 

IF I felt that I could avoid it, I should not write 
this chapter, for I hold that the American 
woman is a woman before she is an American. I 
should rather write, with an American slant, an 
essay on woman unqualified, consider her as 
affected by the primal emotions of love, hatred, 
ambition; I fear that my title may misrepresent 
me, that it may imply separation of the American 
woman from her sisters, whether British or Eskimo, 
which is not intended. But, though she may not 
differ from them essentially, at least among the 
central masses of the country, her exterior mani- 
festations of character do establish bright contrasts 
with the woman of Europe. Of those one must take 
note. One must also take note of the fact that 
most Americans ask most Europeans, "What do 
you think of the American woman?" and seem to 
expect a reply embodying amazement before an 
entirely new human species. 

The stranger's difficulty is made all the more 
intense by his endeavors to find out what is an 



ii6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

American. Is it the descendant of a Pennsylvanian 
German who immigrated a century and a half ago, 
or a recent immigrant of British stock, or an Irish- 
man with forty years' poUtical work behind him, 
a long Yankee, a square-headed, thick-jowled sales- 
man called Smith, whose father came across as 
Strubelsky? The questioning stranger finds the 
problem more puzzling among the women because 
fashion levels their appearance. He watches the 
procession of British, Italian, Jewish, Slav types; 
if he has opportunity to speak with them, their 
accent is uniform; he asks himself whether their 
national point of view is uniform, whether the 
American woman is anything but a European var- 
nish in America. And if that is the case, then the 
varnish. . . . What is the varnish.? 

If we assume as an average American type the 
woman whose parents, of immigrant extraction, 
were born in the United States, one thing can be 
said of her in general — her physical attractions are 
very great. It is no exaggeration to lay down that, 
though not every young American woman is 
pretty, she nearly always knows how to seem it. 
She is excessively well groomed; she takes of her 
hair and her hands a care that the average English- 
woman does not; she gives intelligent thought to 
her clothes. However tired, the stenographer 
presses her skirt every day, and spends upon its 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 117 

renewal money she sometimes needs for food. 
She outclasses the Englishwoman because she is 
less given to breaking her lines with bows and 
frills; she takes trouble with her shoes; she is very 
near to the Frenchwoman in her style of dressing, 
except that she uses stronger colors and that she 
sometimes adds to a simple model gown a trimming 
one could do without. Strong colors are not against 
her; for my part, I am rather tired of the eternal 
black and white, fawn and gray, of Paris. Some of 
this lore seems to be imparted at certain finishing 
schools where she is taught the care of skin, hands, 
hair, which is never done in an English school, 
where it is despised, or in a French school, where 
it would be thought improper. The tendency to 
decoration is so strong that I have even seen sev- 
eral colored girls with their cheeks rouged and their 
mouths made up. This had a little exotic air that 
was rather pleasing, but it seems to me to repre- 
sent the highest point of feminine egotism. 

Reverting to the problem offered by the admix- 
ture of races, though there are no female American 
types corresponding with the two dominant male 
types, there is a common facial characteristic. I 
noticed this soon after arrival, but it was two 
months before I could define it. You find in 
America long faces, round faces, dark skins, and 
fair skins, and yet they are mostly American, in 



ii8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

this sense that the features are more marked than 
they are in Europe. That seems to me to be the 
definition. The eyes are larger, the lips much 
thicker or much thinner, the chin and jaw lines 
more pronounced. The American woman has more 
emphatic features than the European woman. 
What is interesting is that in the cities she does 
not recognize that nature has endowed her with 
strong features, so she powders, uses lip salve, 
strengthens her eyebrows, or thins them into half- 
circular brush strokes, and kohls her eyelids much 
more than the European. Also, when the fashion 
in dress tends toward undressing, she is rather ex- 
cessive. This may be due to the hot summers; it 
may point to temperature rather than tempera- 
ment, but it may also express one side of her psy- 
chology. Where the European woman suggests, 
the American woman proclaims. If I may gen- 
eralize so far as to say that the English attitude in 
woman is to sit down and look sweet until some 
one notices her, that the French attitude is to edge 
away, but not too far, I suppose I may define the 
American attitude as to storm the mild fortress 
which is called the American man. 

I have been told that the American woman does 
not take pains to attract men, and that is to a 
certain extent true. I have passed six months in 
this country, visited many cities, and been on the 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 119 

lookout for any Interesting facts, but I have never 
seen an American girl give to a man in the street 
what the EngHsh call the "glad eye." That is a 
matter of method; I feel that she is merely re- 
serving her strength and that when she decides to 
go over the top she does it with a speed and vigor 
which a European would call unmaidenly. She 
tends to bash rather than to entangle. Excess in 
clothing and decoration does not at all mean that 
women are trying to attract men. Women don't 
dress for men; they know better than that; they 
know better than waste themselves on a sex so 
dull; they dress for one another, and half the strain 
of fashion is due to their knowledge that they are 
appearing before women, the hardest critics, and 
the most learned. 

I have talked in this sense with a certain number 
of American men, who did not like the subject 
much. I find the American point of view on 
women rather difficult to understand. There pre- 
vails in this country a cult — we may call it gynae- 
olatry — a verbal worship of woman in the abstract 
which puzzles a person like me, who insists on look- 
ing upon women as merely human beings. When 
an American man talks to one about the nobility 
and purity of women, about their remoteness from 
the common temptations of mankind, one is quite 
as surprised as when one meets the universal cyn- 



I20 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

ical type which hates woman and thinks her capable 
of all crimes. Many Americans are willing to 
assert that there lies a spiritual beauty in the soul 
of woman. This again puzzles me, for I do not 
know what spiritual means; I think beauty unde- 
finable, and am suspicious of the soul. I find it 
difficult to identify the point of view of the United 
States of Femininity, because Americans, when you 
press them, willingly confess that "Frenchwomen 
are loose. Englishwomen are hypocritical, etc.," and 
then, by degrees, allow you to feel that their 
women are not as other women, that they have a 
superior idealism, that they are lifted above the 
grossness of the world — which are chilly things to 
say of women. They seem to think the American 
woman incapable of sin, yet all the time one has a 
queer sense that this rhapsody is recited like a 
lesson which they have read somewhere, perhaps a 
lesson which has been proclaimed to them by the 
objects of their adoration. 

The American woman undoubtedly proclaims 
herself (by word and deed) to the uncommitted 
male. She is a good partisan of her sex; she thinks 
it a fine thing to be a woman, while her mate finds 
no special pride in being a man. I think she her- 
self has set up the standard of virtue by which her 
men measure her. 

The American is more than the European woman 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 121 

conscious of her importance. She is conscious 
in a double sense — namely, she thinks highly of 
women in general, and she generally thinks fairly 
highly of herself in particular. This is not an 
attack, for no respect is deserved by those who do 
not respect themselves, but between conceit and 
self-respect lies an abyss that can be bridged only 
by common sense. Generally speaking, I have 
found few American women unduly satisfied with 
their own charms and capacities, or their position; 
but I have found a somewhat inflated idea of the 
value and power of woman in general. 

Many American women seem persuaded that no 
standard exists for their comparison with the Eu- 
ropeans, that they are the product of another age, 
and that it is their mission to show mankind what 
woman can do. They consider that in coolness of 
mind, in executive capacity, in logical faculty, in 
beauty of spiritual imagination, they have attained 
heights of which their European sisters have not 
reached the foothills. Women's writings, in Amer- 
ican books and magazines, are spattered with 
phrases that exhibit narcissism. (There is no 
pathological implication in this, except in so far as 
self-admiration is a pathological reaction.) For in- 
stance, in Women and the New Race, by Mrs. 
Sanger, we are told that women, by controlling 
birth, may remake the world. A little farther on, we 



122 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

are told that upon the shoulders of woman, con- 
scious of her freedom, rests the responsibility of 
creating a new sex morality. These pretentions 
seem to me not only excessive, but also exclusive; it 
takes two to make a morality. If women were to 
enforce a new moral attitude, in which man had 
no say, we, who for years have been attacking 
man-made laws, would equally object to woman- 
made laws. 

This brings us back to the American woman's 
belief that she is not as other women. I have 
several times received shocked criticisms of the 
heroine of my novel, Bli7id Alley, who has a pas- 
sionate though incomplete affair with a married 
^man. In every case I have been asked whether 
Monica is "a typical English girl," and told that 
"no American girl would behave like this." Such 
illusions — the newspapers being filled with sex 
crimes — must be rooted in vanity. You find this 
feminine national vanity everywhere. For instance, 
I was brought into contact with a woman who was 
to show me that I did not understand her sex, to 
explain the American woman, so that I might real- 
ize the progress and the change brought about in 
the New World. The question arose between us 
whether courtship should be practiced as an art. 
I had ventured to write down a few views as to the 
way in which men should conduct their courtship. 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 123 

so as to obtain from the woman they love the 
maximum of response. I had indicated that, in 
my opinion, any man who can support a woman 
can get a wife, but maybe will not obtain love. 
Thereupon followed a detailed statement of the 
process by which the self-esteem of a woman is 
encouraged, and elementary notes on the treatment 
of rivals, the maintenance of freshness in a long 
engagement, etc. These views infuriated not only 
the lady in question, but three more of the same 
kind. I was told that these ideas, these old- 
fashioned flatteries, these preambles, these devious 
devotions, are merely boring to the young ladies 
with direct minds who go around to-day deciding 
whom they will matrimonially devour. It was 
added that perhaps Englishwomen were like this, 
but that it would not do in America. (You see, 
the national ending is inevitable.) 

What is one to reply to these inflated state- 
ments.? Do some women walk the world blindly? 
Do they not see men striving to gain the regard of 
a woman who hesitates.? Do they really believe 
that the modern woman, after a period occupied 
by golf, or noncommittal rides in the Subway, is 
suddenly asked by a man, "Will you marry me?" 
and bluntly replies, *'Yes, let's get hitched." I 
think many do believe this. The woman who is 
intoxicated with the progress made by her sex can 



124 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

spend a week on Broadway, or, what is still more 
revealing, a week in small-town socials, and con- 
tinue to believe that there has been an enormous 
change in the relations of the sexes. She believes 
what she wants to believe; in America it is extraor- 
dinary how many educated women fail to realize 
what a faint scratch has been made on human 
nature by the last fifty years. They seem to allow 
nothing for the effect of tradition on the uncon- 
scious or subconscious part of the female tempera- 
ment. Female education in the United States 
began only seventy or eighty years ago. If you go 
a little farther back you find Martha Washington 
making her pickles, fearing God, and keeping her 
mind free from ideas that did not concern her. 
Behind those three generations of educated women 
lie about two thousand generations of women who 
were not cousins of the ape, but women with a 
language and a rude civilization. Now, is it reason- 
able to put the cultivation of two or three genera- 
tions against fifty thousand years.? Can a short 
course in a prairie university so entirely do away 
with the traditions, the compulsions, the inhibi- 
tions left behind by a period so long that it makes 
the history of Egypt almost news for this after- 
noon's newspaper ^ I do not want to stress this, but 
I do think that an elementary knowledge of com- 
parative history compels one to laugh aside the 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 125 

Idea of a revolution in the female mind, whether 
In Europe or in America. The difference between 
this day and a hundred years ago amounts to a 
varnish; the reformer had better realize that, so 
that his reforming energies may not be dulled by an 
over<:omplacent sense of achievement. This does 
not mean that the American woman is wrong in 
feeling pride in the conquests of her sex, nor is she 
wrong in thinking that she has gone farther in 
freedom than her European sisters. Only she has 
not gone quite so far as she thinks. 

In the days of chivalry the knight went on his 
knees to his lady, but he took this as a formality. 
The kneeling attitude of the modern American 
seems honest. He definitely admires his women. 
He does not, like the Parisian, stress their elegance; 
like the Frenchman, their beauty; while vaunting 
their smartness and good looks, he especially values 
their moral quality; he accords them a certain 
dignity, which Europe refuses them. America is 
definitely a woman's country. But when you con- 
sider the facts a little more closely you begin to be 
doubtful. I don't know in how many hundreds of 
crowded street cars I have ridden, but only two or 
three times have I seen a man give up his seat to 
a woman. 

I quite understand that American life is hard 
and competitive, but this does not quite accord 



126 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

with the goddess theory. Likewise, one Is struck by 
the position women seem to have attained in busi- 
ness, until one has deahngs with their firms. I 
have had to do with many American business 
organizations; in a number of cases I had to 
make arrangements with an underling. Whenever 
the underling was a man, all went well; in the 
two cases where I had to deal with a woman, no 
further notice was taken of the messages. I have 
a vision of the offices where these women carried 
their messages, of the man in charge listening to 
his male subordinate, and telling the woman to run 
away and play. 

This, of course, is not a generalization, but 
merely an indication. I have been equally surprised 
by the conquests made in business by American 
women. It is rather a shock to a European to meet 
a pretty girl of twenty-seven, to hear that she is 
employed in a drug corporation, and then to dis- 
cover that she is a director. A shock to find a 
woman running a lawyer's office entailing annual 
expenses of seven or eight thousand dollars, and 
making a living. It is a surprise to find the Amer- 
ican stenographer earning four times as much as 
her European sister. All those shocks, however, 
arise out of particular instances, and, though I 
agree that the American woman has made herself 
a good position, when I go through a business- 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 127 

reference book I find that not one in a hundred 
of the leading names is the name of a woman. In 
America man still rules; all you can say is that 
he does not rule women so harshly as he does 
in Europe. 

These suspicions as to the actual position of 
women in America are strengthened when one in- 
vestigates a little more closely the achievements 
which have been so loudly advertised in the press. 
Consider, for instance, the position of women in 
the American civil service. The Women's Bureau 
of the United States Department of Labor has 
recently issued a report on "Women in Govern- 
ment Service." During the period considered, 
86 per cent of the women appointed were given 
salaries lower than ^1,300 a year, while only 36 
per cent of the men were given positions as low as 
this. The report goes on to show that as the 
amount of salary advances, the number of women 
appointed decreases. For positions higher than 
^1,300 a year, only 5 per cent of the women are 
appointed, as against 46 per cent of the men. If 
we view the situation a little differently, and com- 
pare government appointments with the number of 
women who passed the requisite examination for 
the higher posts, we find that, while 59 per cent of 
the female candidates passed the clerical tests for 
middle positions, the commissioners did not ap- 



128 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

point, as one might think they would, 59 per cent 
of the women to the middle positions. They 
appointed 72 per cent; the difference of 13 per 
cent represents female candidates who were given 
a middle position instead of the superior position 
they had won in open contest. And if we consider 
the posts where special training is required, while 
30 per cent of the female candidates were eligible, 
only 15 per cent were appointed. As the examina- 
tions harmonize as nearly as possible with the va- 
cancies, it follows that in every case women were 
deprived of anything between a quarter and a half 
of the rights which they obtained by open examina- 
tion in competition with the men. 

The reader should not conclude that I am mak- 
ing a case against the treatment of women in 
America. I am quite aware that in every way of 
life woman is better treated in the United States 
than in any other part of the world, that the mar- 
riage and divorce laws, notably in many states, are 
her excessive partisans. But it would be foolish 
to believe that woman's battle has been completely 
won in the United States. She still has a great 
deal to do to achieve equality; she had better re- 
alize this, and struggle for it, than be led away by 
sentimental eulogies of her achievements, and more 
or less dishonest proclamations of her supremacy. 

Two instances of the lyrical exaggerations which 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 129 

lead American women to believe that the male 
world Is open to them, I find In an article In the 
Pictorial Review called "Two Women Lawyers at 
the Head of Their Profession." One Is Mrs. 
Georgia P. Bullock, deputy district attorney and 
public prosecutor of Los Angeles. That Is a high- 
sounding title, and one must not underrate the 
achievement of Mrs. Bullock; but, if one looks 
carefully Into details of her work, one cannot avoid 
the feeling that she is the deputy district attorney 
with emphasis on the deputy. It Is true that she 
goes into court to prosecute, but it is permissible 
to doubt whether she is given the more important 
prosecutions. Furthermore, her special work ap- 
pears to be the settlement of disputes between hus- 
bands and wives, the collection of money from de- 
faulting husbands. In other words, she seems to 
be merely a probation officer on a large scale. I 
do not say that her duties are unimportant, but 
I do say that they are much less responsible and 
much less independently performed than her title 
would suggest. 

The second case is that of Mrs. Annette Abbott 
Adams, described as the first woman Assistant 
Attorney-General of the United States. Here, In- 
deed, Is a high-sounding title, but as one reads the 
details one feels more and more that Mrs. Adams 
is not so much the Assistant Attorney-General as 



I30 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

the assistant to the Attorney-General. Here again 
is a woman who goes into court and pleads, but 
here once more is a woman whose work seems 
mainly to be the examination and preparation of 
cases for the decision of her male chief. Hers is a 
powerful post, but it has nothing of the supreme. 
She is not mistress of her office. She may have 
men under her, but she has men over her. Until 
a woman actually occupies a Cabinet post, or the 
sole headship of a government department, the 
case will not have been made; until then one is 
justified in saying that the people who make out 
that the American woman has got to the top are 
either untruthful or sentimental. 

One of the most interesting features of the 
American woman question is the supremacy of the 
girl. In Europe the girl hardly counts at all; in 
Scandinavia, Russia, Germany, she has, to a certain 
extent, emancipated herself, but has thereby lost 
a little in bourgeois consideration. In the south of 
Europe, and even in France, she is still a chattel of 
the family, while in England she is completely 
eclipsed by the young married woman. It is a 
remarkable thing in an American summer hotel to 
see the owners of automobiles filling their cars with 
young girls, while the young matrons are left 
behind. Yet the young married woman is far more 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 131 

attractive, far more amusing than the bread-and- 
butter miss. Except in rather fast circles, she 
seems in America to be almost entirely ignored. 
Everything goes to the girl — money for college, for 
training, social consideration; she is encouraged to 
waywardness, as if the men took a delight in her 
freshness, her mischievousness, and enjoyed her 
youthful petulance. It is rather regrettable in a 
way, for it leads to the conclusion that the American 
woman's good time is rather short. 

After her marriage she can assert herself over her 
husband; if she is rich she can attain a big social 
position, be feted, photographed, but she's not the 
catch of the season; she is the caught. If she is 
poor, she is taken little notice of; she is not counted 
as a woman; her husband is supposed to provide 
courtship, and he is seldom at home. If, as is most 
likely, she has to do a lot of housework because she 
finds no help, she loses her looks rather quickly. 
Her skin dries; at twenty she is exquisite; at 
thirty-five nerves and boredom have aged her. 
Since her marriage she has not counted. Many will 
remember the triumph of Miss Alice Roosevelt, 
who was described as "Princess Alice"; since her 
marriage she has not been heard of as "Queen 
Alice." She may now be a social leader, but she 
has ceased to "star." A debutante is a normal 
star, which sets when changed from Miss to Mrs. 



132 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

The American girl has the time of a butterfly; it 
is not a long one, but it is a better time than the 
European's. If she works, it is a national custom 
to entertain her, to give her things, and this may- 
have something to do with the development of her 
character. I hesitate to dissect anything so com- 
plex. I suppose that excessively hard pictures of 
her were made by Henry James in Daisy Miller^ by 
Mr. Owen Johnson in The Salamander, and by 
Mrs. Wharton in The Custom of the Country, but 
I do believe that a certain hardness must afflict 
the American girl, owing to excess of good things 
which she enjoys very early and very easily. When 
one obtains things easily one looks upon them as 
a natural right. If then one's rights are flouted 
one grows peevish. 

It is rather interesting to listen to the American 
girl when she visits England; she can't understand 
the man who gives her no candies or flowers, who 
seldom takes her to the theater, and who actually 
expects her to amuse him instead of working to 
amuse her. I confess that I don't like her as well 
as the American married woman, who has been 
reduced by work and difficulties to a state devoid 
of petulance. She has lost a few illusions. She is 
no longer leading the rather excited life of the 
well-to-do girl, and the fairly excited after-hours 
life of the popular working girl. An Englishwoman 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 133 

who has lived in America many years sends in the 
following criticism of the American girl: "She ac- 
cepts life as it is and makes the most of it; she 
neither digs up corpses nor broods over injuries; 
she goes on to the next adventure life offers, ignor- 
ing the past. She sheds few tears, would consider 
the fostering of her soul absurd, the pursuit of 
beauty irrelevant. She lives untouched by beauty 
and sorrow." I reproduce, but neither assent to 
nor differ from this. 

It is the American girl, more than the American 
woman, who embodies the national restlessness. 
She is always meeting young men in a queer, com- 
radely way; she is always on the telephone, making 
a date; automobiles appear for her late in the 
evening; she goes out with the moon and returns 
with the sun. There is something bright, almost 
metallic about her, and the Englishman grows be- 
wildered when he tries to understand the process 
of starvation which turns her into the modest and 
even resigned American wife. I am picking my 
words; in spite of their proclamations, I doubt 
whether the American man is quite as much at his 
wife's feet as is made out. It seems to me that he 
respects his wife as he respects an expensive pic- 
ture. He talks a great deal about the high quali- 
ties of women, but tends to treat them Hke little 

dears. He seems to revere women in general, but 
10 



134 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

perhaps not in particular, his wife being the most 
particular of instances. 

In America women do have a good deal of power, 
but I suspect that this is because the men are so 
busy that they have no time to argue, and too little 
time to exercise all the powers themselves. So 
they hand over some of the minor powers, and 
honestly believe that this constitutes a female 
coronation. That is why the well-to-do married 
woman in America generally strikes me as unhappy. 
While the poor man's wife lives the universal hard 
but human life of the poorer European wife, the 
wife of the man of middle fortune seems eaten up 
by vain ambitions. But even she is less unhappy 
than the rich wife, for her husband works short 
hours and gives her companionship, while too many 
rich wives see their overworked, business-haunted 
husbands only at an occasional evening meal, when 
guests separate them; she is alone while he travels; 
hence her frantic search for amusements, faiths, 
causes, social life, movement, always movement. 
My mental picture of the rich American wife 
is a grim one; while the rich Englishwoman is 
often bored by her husband, the American equiv- 
alent is bored by having no husband at all. 
Within a few years of her marriage her lover 
goes back to his office and does not come out 
again. 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 135 

At a small hut high-browed gathering {often, but 
not only, in America). 

Young Lady: "Mr. George, I'm just crazy to 
know what you think of Miss May Sinclair." 

Mr. George: "Well ..." 

Young Lady: "Don't you think her books are 
full of cosmic universality.? Oh, do tell me what 
you think." 

Mr. George: "You mean ..." 

Young Lady: "What I like about Miss Sin- 
clair is just that — her sense of the universal cosmos. 
Now in my home town in Oregon they want to 
know just what you think." 

Mr. George: "From the ..." 

Young Lady: "If you think she co-ordinates 
the analyses of the psyche of the characters, then 
what I want to know is how she correlates the 
theory of the moron with that of the urning. ..." 

Mr. George: "I . . ." 

[Young Lady discusses Bergson and the Matri- 
archate. 

Mr. George: "You ..." 

[Young Lady discusses Sinn Fein and the decay 
of taste. 

Mr. George: "If . . ." 

[Young Lady discusses Mr. Carl Sandburg, Long- 
fellow, psychoanalysis, Mrs. Fiske, prohibition, 
spooks, Alexander Hamilton, the negro question. 



136 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

the BarrymoreSy the exchange problem, and Yel- 
lowstone Park. 

Mr. George: "When ..." 

Young Lady {rapturously): "I'm so glad to 
have met you. You've no idea, Mr. George, how 
they hang upon your sHghtest word way out in 
Oregon. I do love to hear you talk." 

[She continues. Mr. George is later discovered 
concealed in the refrigerator. 

That sort of thing rather worries one. Because 
of it, perhaps, I have spent in America little time in 
literary circles and much more in places where 
they talked of copper and of corn. But, though it is 
tiring, it is not so absurd as it sounds; indeed, it 
has significances which should be neither ignored 
nor derided. My impression of the American 
woman is that on an average she is intellectually 
more developed than the European; potentially, 
she is not superior, but in development she is. The 
American woman is to the European what a tilled 
field is to an untilled field. She is infinitely better 
informed, more interested in new ideas, more ready 
to accept a new theory of life, just as her man, 
compared with the European, is readier to accept 
a new invention. There is hardly anything in 
which one may not hope to interest her; the 
traveling Englishman is continually surprised to 
encounter in cities of thirtv thousand inhabitants 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 137 

large groups of clubwomen who meet month after 
month, and year after year, to hear lectures on 
literature, social questions, foreign lands. He dis- 
covers in their houses the best new books; he is 
asked questions which reveal acquaintance with the 
world's movements; he receives the expression of 
views which only a year before were being ex- 
pounded at the Sorbonne or at Jena. England has 
nothing like this. In a small English town you gen- 
erally discover one or two delightful and cultured 
women, who are more or less miserable because 
they find the men as stupid as men know how to 
be, and intelligent female society nonexistent. The 
brilliant Englishwoman in the country must shut 
herself up with her books; there is nothing else 
for her. The brilliant American woman, on the 
other hand, has this unique outlet of club life, which 
draws together most of the women of brains that 
live in the locality, and also a large number of 
women of inferior intellectual capacity, who hon- 
estly want to improve that intellectual capacity, 
are anxious to get hold of all the new ideas and 
manifestations of art. Only in very big English 
cities do women have clubs, and even then one 
might say that in those institutions the English- 
women assemble to gulp tea, while the American 
women assemble to gulp ideas. 

Many American men laugh at the women's clubs. 



138 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

They find these places humorous. Also they like 
to pretend that clubwomen wear bloomers. But, 
having by now visited a large number of women's 
dubs all over the country, I know quite well that 
every one of them is a center for culture and stimu- 
lus. The eagerness with which an idea is received 
by American clubwomen is the most hopeful side 
in American civilization. It seems the most hope- 
ful because the action of the women, which is now 
only beginning to make itself felt, amounts to a 
reaction against the money-getting male. Leaving 
aside the artist and the scientific genius, it appears 
that in all countries the man is to-day less vivid, 
less open-minded, than the woman. This is par- 
ticularly the case in England, where the average 
man is a stupefied creature, intellectually much 
inferior to his wife. The average American woman 
is, it is true, less superior to the average American 
man than is the average Englishwoman to the 
average Englishman, but she does outdo him in 
her keenness for new outlooks. Thus she becomes 
the force that leads to the cultural development of 
her country. 

Naturally, if I may use an old aphorism, "one 
makes no omelet without breaking eggs." The 
sad conversation I had with a young lady, which 
is reproduced above, is an instance of what can 
happen to a woman who has taken in her culture 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 139 

in too large doses and too fast. Very commonly, 
when you meet a well-educated American woman, 
you find that the conversation runs more than is 
comfortable on French literature, Claudel, Marcel 
Proust, Paul Fort; you will suffer quotations from 
Westermarck; you may drift into general ideas, 
philosophy, psychology. That embarrasses the 
Englishman for two reasons: one of them is that 
he is accustomed to talking to women about plays, 
games, holiday resorts, etc., or, if he belongs to a 
more evolved type, of love. The second reason is 
that he is not accustomed to being told what the 
woman thinks; he is accustomed to tell her what 
he thinks, and to being helped to develop what he 
chooses to call his ideas by a minimum of contra- 
diction. So the American woman worries him. He 
finds that she is using him as a sounding board to 
try her latest song; he feels he is being lectured; 
and if, as is often the case, she changes the subject 
at frequent intervals, he fears he is being jabbed. 
As a rule, he therefore dislikes that type and is 
thankful when he escapes to the American girl. 
Unfortunately, the American girl seems to expect 
him to play golf and tennis, to swim and climb 
trees in a single morning, so the vitality of the 
American feminine rather worries him. 

What worries him particularly in the American 
woman is the presence of this active, prehensile 



140 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mind within an attractive form. He meets a 
woman in the middle twenties; she has a clear, 
beautiful skin; she is well manicured; she wears an 
attractive frock of chiffon, which is not crumpled; 
she is a woman with whom he feels he ought to 
exchange some sentimentalities, this being the 
thing to do. Only he does not know how to begin. 
She is too serious, too interested; she seems too 
aloof from these natural things. If he is strongly 
attracted, he considers with a certain misery that 
these well-cut lips are wasting their time in dis- 
cussing psychoanalysis and that he might find 
them better employment — if only he knew what 
to do. Should he, he wonders, begin by an epigram 
out of Bernard Shaw ? He asks the American man, 
who, he naturally concludes, knows something of 
the emotional temperament of his countrywomen. 
The American man, if that day he is in a cynical 
mood, instead of his normal state of rhapsody, gives 
him advice which I cannot reproduce here, and 
the Englishman sadly shakes his head and walks 
away. 

The difficulty of the European is that he gen- 
erally looks upon sex attraction as the basis of all 
relations between men and women. To a great 
extent he is right, in this sense that between every 
man and every woman who like each other at all 
there is at least a streak of that attraction. But 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 141 

while the European Is accustomed to viewing that 
streak through a microscope, In America he has to 
use a telescope. So he flounders in Bergson, and 
tries to discuss pragmatism; he tries to get back to 
the firm ground of his intersexual concept. Some- 
times, when he plunges and Induces the woman to 
talk of love, his trouble Increases, because he finds 
the intellectual American woman Inclined to look 
upon love as something between a sacrament and 
a laboratory test. He encounters a high idealism 
about "the Divinity of Sex," which seems to him 
as fantastic as It Is cosmic. He Is told that love is 
not so simple as the symbolic holding of hands. 
It must be dosed and analyzed before practice; It 
must be organized Into a conjugal eucharlst, pre- 
pared for, practiced on the appointed day, certified 
by Doctor Freud as well as by Mr. Pussyfoot John- 
son. The Englishman becomes horrified; he Is in 
the middle of things he cannot understand. The 
native kisses knew less complexity; there was less 
sense of national welfare in his embraces of yore. 
It Is only by degrees that he grasps that the passion 
of two individuals Is not an Intimate thing. All 
his life he has been making a mistake about that. 
He begins to realize that the people he calls lovers 
are merely delegates of the race; he conceives It as 
possible that in days to come they may be duly 
elected (for three years of the duration of the 



142 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

boon in divorce) by a jury of matrons. So he 
flounders among the latest theories of psychiatry 
and the newest statistics of the congenitally bhnd 
until at last he struggles on to the firm, safe old 
English ground of commonplace and says, "Yes, 
I see; one must not be selfish.'' To which he re- 
ceives as a reply, "The sex relation must be ego- 
phobocentric." 

All this, of course, is on the surface; I develop 
this aspect only because the visiting Englishman is 
so easily deceived by that surface. What he does 
not understand, until he takes trouble, is that the 
new and swift education of the American woman 
is responsible for a certain rawness in her culture. 
What has happened is that, within half a century, 
the American woman has acquired more informa- 
tion, considered more ideas, than she could assimi- 
late in thrice the time. Skyscrapers are built at the 
rate of a floor a week; an attempt has uncon- 
sciously been made by the American woman to 
construct her mind at that pace. But it is not so 
easy to modify the mind as to hasten the laying of 
the inanimate brick. An idea planted in a mind is 
not inanimate. It is a thing that develops into a 
sometimes quite unexpected form. An idea which 
was planted for a lily often turns out, when full 
grown, to be a hollyhock; and another lily may 
produce, not a hollyhock, but a chrysanthemum. 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 143 

The result is that, having started with a perfectly- 
orderly bed of lilies, put in a little hurriedly, with- 
out thorough examination of the bulbs, the ulti- 
mate result is a garden in a state of some disorder 
in which, human nature being what it is, grow 
a certain number of weeds. 

This metaphor should not be taken as an attack, 
for it is better to plant rather at random than not 
to plant at all, but I think it explains what I mean 
— that the intellectual ambition of the American 
woman has proved so swift, so greedy, so magnif- 
icently open to the newest things, that it would be 
unreasonable to expect it to produce everywhere 
an entirely balanced state of mind. The American 
woman is making intellectual experiments. Al- 
ready she is ahead of the European in variety of 
product. As time goes on, she may be less anxious 
to seek novelty and prove more inclined to proceed 
with the ordering and qualification of her pres- 
ent collection. Meanwhile, she is on the right 
road from the point of view of her development. 
Whether this road will ultimately lead her into 
cool intellectuality, whether intellect will be ab- 
sorbed for the strengthening of emotion, is im- 
possible to say, but she is doing one great thing — 
she is shaking free from the intellectual stag- 
nation which for so many centuries kept her so 
enslaved. 



144 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

Believing as I do that in fundamentals such as 
love human beings change very slowly, it is difficult 
to generalize on the love emotion in the United 
States. It is impossible and untrue to say that 
human passions are in America more developed or 
less developed than they are elsewhere. That is 
the sort of thing which one does not know. But 
one can go so far as to compare two nations by 
saying that a certain type (common to both) is 
more prevalent in one race than in the other. One 
encounters frigid Sicilians and fanciful Swiss, only 
one does not encounter them very often. The 
Englishman in America is considerably puzzled as 
to the love relations of the inhabitants, partly be- 
cause climate and race make them so various, 
partly because they are abundantly discussed and 
therefore obscured by words and expositions of 
idealism. Also, he comes across amusing con- 
trasts. He may drift into a radical group where, 
in presence of several people, a woman will say, 
"I am suffering from sex starvation." On the other 
hand, he may encounter a number of women who 
declare it sinful to smoke a cigarette. If, as he 
should, he makes allowances for extremes, he is 
puzzled by the public behavior of men and women. 

One case that occurs to me is that of a couple 
whom I was able to watch unobserved. The man 
belonged to the viveur type; the woman did not 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 145 

look unapproachable. For five days they were 
continually in each other's company. They obvi- 
ously enjoyed it, to the exclusion of others. Their 
conversations were continuous, and yet I never 
saw between them the slightest familiarity, even 
when once, by accident, I came across them in a 
dark garden; they were sitting well apart, talking, 
talking — as if there were something in this idea 
that comradeship can exist between woman and 
man. This is not a solitary case. American men 
and women are either more capable of purely 
mental relations than are Europeans; or they are 
more careful to conceal what may lie behind the 
mental; or the women set upon themselves such 
a price that they are able to repel familiarity. It 
seems to me that one of these three solutions must 
apply. If the first or the third is the correct one, 
this must mean that the frigid type is more com- 
mon in the United States than it is in Europe. One 
hesitates to conclude in a manner so sweeping, but 
the behavior of couples leads one rather in that 
direction. 

For my part, I suspect that the impulses of the 
American women, though much the same as those 
of the European women, are to a certain extent in- 
hibited by two factors — the materialistic civiliza- 
tion and the survival of puritanism. One should 
not underrate the effects upon the feminine tem- 



r 



146 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

perament of the haste, restlessness, and hectic 
intensity of American Hfe. The noise of the 
streets, for instance, must have an effect; it has 
even been suggested to me that the rather high 
voice of the American woman is due to the effort 
she must make to dominate the surrounding 
sounds of traffic. But that is a detail; what I am 
thinking of is that the effort to get on, to make 
money, to enjoy all the life that can be torn from 
sleep, is likely to cause mental anaemia, which is 
unfavorable to emotional indulgence. Purity can 
very well be a form of exhaustion; one's mind 
may be so full of things to do, appointments to 
keep, faces to remember; one may be so over- 
worked, or so overplayed, that one literally has 
not the time for those brooding states of mind 
where flourishes the impulse to emotion. I have 
the impression that the American woman of the 
towns is generally a tired woman; she goes too hard 
at work and too hard at play to have energy for 
the dallyings which occupy her European sisters. 

Before touching on the puritanic question, one 
must remember that one of the results of intense 
American life, of its need for pleasure, is the need 
for money. The American man, so often cynical, 
comes more and more to look upon himself as 
exploited by women, and this whether he is mar- 
ried or single. He seems to discern a certain hard- 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 147 

ness, particularly in the American girl, who appre- 
ciates him if he can afford to give her a good time, 
to present her with the many things which she 
violently desires. Fairly often, in the magazines, 
I find stories where the woman is shown as demand- 
ing of man more than he can afford, and these 
are more common than tales of male selfishness. 
Briefly, there is a masculine revolt against the 
privileges gained by women when they were few. 
This does not imply hostile criticism on my part. 
In the first place, it is quite natural that a young 
girl should desire to possess things. In the second 
place, it seems to be a national custom to spoil 
the American girl. It is not so much a question of 
greed as a question of habit; if, as may happen, 
the American girl thinks poorly of the man who 
does not take her to the theater or present her with 
candies, she is only expressing what the European 
woman would feel if a man forgot to remove his 
hat. Briefly, I do not believe that the mercenary 
instinct goes very much deeper than it does in 
Europe. It may express itself more flagrantly; it 
is more brutal to call a husband a "meal ticket" 
than a "good match"; but expression is nothing 
by the side of fact. The American woman is often 
getting what the European would like to get. 
Both are ready to make concessions to obtain these 
things, and both of them will concede as little as 



148 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

they can, which is humanly normal. If the Amer- 
ican woman "gets away'' with it, while the Euro- 
pean seldom does, it is because American public 
opinion is prepared to let her "get away" with it. 
Her aspiration to money arises partly from the 
insecurity of American life, where fortunes are 
risked and jobs insecure; it connects with the 
intoxication of swift-made fortunes. Her demand 
for a good time is the obvious reply to her men's 
financial Napoleonism. She is in no sense abnormal 
in her aspirations; whether she is inhibited in her 
responses I do not know. 

My own belief, judging from a number of in- 
quiries, is that no sensible essay can be written on 
this subject without taking into account the tem- 
perament of the American man. After all, women 
are what men make them, and men what women 
make them. In spite of the life lived at a few 
smart and continental holiday resorts, I believe 
there is less moral slackness among educated Amer- 
ican women than among the English equivalent. 
The tradition of the country is against it. Mar- 
riage is favored; after marriage, either the house- 
hold cares are so heavy, or the social pleasures so 
whirling, that there is less need for emotional 
stimulant than there is in soberer lands. Lastly, 
the American divorce law makes irregularity un- 
necessary; the rich man and the poor man can, 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 149 

by shifting their capital or their labor from state 
to state, live in legal free love by means of frequent 
divorce. Only the man in the middle is tied up. 
The fact that last year there were two hundred 
more divorces in Chicago alone than in the whole 
of England and Wales illustrates what I mean by 
legal free love. In all this the American man ap- 
pears as an enigmatical figure. He seems to me 
at the same time forward and backward. He is 
aggressive to women in trifling ways, but seems to 
hold back when the situation grows intense. He 
will use a chance opportunity in an elevator, but 
will not create one in the street, as if he were afraid 
of something, as if he were leashed. To a certain 
extent he is leashed by local laws, which thrust 
upon loose men financial and even criminal re- 
sponsibilities, which appall the man of middle 
fortune. In the very rich and very poor ranks of 
society this does not operate so much, and the 
newspapers report many sex crimes and misde- 
meanors. But I doubt whether it is the law makes 
this change in manners; as a rule it is manners 
make a change in law. I suspect that the women 
maintain their standard by establishing moral 
ascendancy. They do not repel attacks; they do 
not have to. Thus I discern less coldness than 
freedom from temptation. If they are tempted, 

it is so far, and not farther. Hence, the surprise 
11 



ISO HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

of the European who finds advances so readily 
repelled. The woman he approaches is so unac- 
customed to such advances that she repels him 
instinctively. 

This may to a certain extent have modified the 
temperament of the American woman; being in- 
sufficiently stimulated; being inflamed with desire 
for clothes, automobiles, residence in the best 
hotels — briefly, money; being trained to believe 
that all will be given her — she may have lost part 
of her capacity for giving. She may have become 
slightly sterilized from the emotional point of 
view; the wifely tyranny that some men complain 
of in America is probably traceable to that. This 
tyranny is also traceable to the puritanism which 
still flickers in most Americans, completely domi- 
nates certain regions, and in general the small 
towns. I mean by puritanism not so much prohi- 
bitions as an attitude of mind. In this sense it 
may generally be said that the American tendency 
is to coat with a film of impropriety all facts and 
ideas aff^ecting passion. Though radical and world- 
ling circles express themselves freely, most Amer- 
ican intercourse is fettered. Jokes are made 
against the married relation, but they are seldom 
more depraved than those of Mutt and Jeff^; there 
are conversational parallels to "Bringing Up 
Father," . . . but it is seldom suggested that Father 



THE AMERICAN WOMAN 151 

needs bringing up from the point of view of fidelity. 
Indeed, the suppressions are so intense that if you 
look down a list of divorces filed for hearing, you 
will find that nearly all allege failure to maintain, 
desertion, or cruelty. When adultery exists, the 
tendency is to hush it up if other causes suffice to 
justify divorce. I doubt whether the American 
woman is by herself responsible for this state of 
things; all over the world man appears more con- 
ventional than woman, and there is no reason to 
think that the American woman (much as she likes 
to think so) differs so greatly from her sisters. But 
I suspect that the suppressions maintained by men 
are so maintained because American men seem to 
feel that they owe respect to the delicate sensibili- 
ties they attribute to their women. As an Amer- 
ican said to me, "We are living in i860; we still 
think that the ladies are brittle and should be car- 
ried about on velvet pads." Realizing, uncon- 
sciously or consciously, the practical value of this 
respect, it may be suggested that the American 
woman encourages it by merely verbal displays of 
prudery; in other words, she avails herself of a 
favorable condition which she does not alone bring 
about; such American puritanism as exists origi- 
nates largely from man. 

The American woman generally gives her sup- 
port to this puritanism, which is natural enough 



152 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

in a society where capitalism alone has power, 
where nearly all capital is vested in the male, and 
where puritanism enables woman to make capital 
out of purity. She has an interest in limiting the 
normal brutality and polygamous instinct of man 
by setting up taboos; she has an equal interest in 
imposing upon him a narrow code of language, sug- 
gestion, and approach, because this handicaps the 
male capitalist in his contest with the sexual 
capitalist. From woman's point of view, manners 
make the shield that shelters morals. The situation 
appears curious only when we consider the intel- 
lectual grade of the women who maintain the hard 
moral standard for others and possibly themselves. 
While they proclaim their contempt for wiles, they 
remember to bewitch; they profess aversion from 
male rule, and demonstrate only to the extent of 
refusing to wear a wedding ring; they proclaim 
themselves free, and yet do not reject gifts. It 
sounds puzzling, like all female problems when 
frankly stated. But, like all female problems, it 
is simple enough, and sums itself in the old human 
desire to have the cake and eat It; more than any 
other the American woman seems able to do this. 



V 

MEGAPOLIS .SOUTHWARD 

I MAY offend a Londoner by giving this name of 
Megapolis to New York. For London, with its 
population of seven and half millions, lays claim to 
the title of "The Great City." It is true that New 
York itself has a population of little over five and a 
half millions, and that even if we add the surround- 
ing territory of Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Jersey 
City, Newark, etc., the total might be less than 
that of London; but New York is a city great not 
only in area; it is great in height, in spirit, In 
emotion. I find it infinitely sympathetic, endowed 
with much of the grace of Paris, but more magnifi- 
cent. Magnificence is the first thing that strikes 
one in New York. Its great buildings, its spreading 
luxury, its lights, its air of skeptical pleasure, its 
moral anaesthesia, of cool ferocity, all that suggests 
republican Rome with a touch of Babylon. 

I love New York. I think I understand it. It 
is in America the only female city, a city of cyni- 
cism and of lace, a more intense Paris, a Vienna 
disguised in the garments of respectability. It is 



154 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

all the cities. Where Chicago offers energy, New 
York offers splendor. It is the only American city 
where people work and play; in the others they 
work. I feel that inevitably in the second genera- 
tion, if not in the first, the oil and cotton of the 
South, the wheat of the Middle West, come to fuse 
themselves in the crucible of pleasure that lies on 
the Hudson. 

Perhaps that is why most of the other cities call 
New York degenerate, because it is not so much 
an industrial city as a city of commerce, a city of 
financiers, and a place which people desert on 
Saturday mornings to play golf. That Is not degen- 
eracy. Indeed, to me. New York is the contrary — 
it is regenerate; it Is the microcosm of the new 
civilization of America, of which the Middle West is 
the basis and the South the memory. 

The colossal scale of New York naturally makes 
upon the stranger his first important impression. 
The American does not realize what a shock New 
York can be to a European who has never before 
seen a building higher than ten floors; the effect is 
bewildering. The monster hotel where the stranger 
makes his first acquaintance with America is itself 
a shock. I began in a hotel which seems to have 
two thousand bedrooms and to carry a rent roll 
of ^20,000 a day. In other words, this is Brob- 
dingnag, the land of the giants. Gigantic chaos, 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 155 

that Is the first feehng I had in New York. Differ- 
ences forced themselves upon me. I missed the 
pubHc houses of England and the cafes of the 
Continent. (The soda cafes, where so few people 
sit down, did not seem to correspond.) Fifth 
Avenue, people so many, traffic so thick that one 
has to take one's turn at a crossing, that police 
control has become mechanical, beyond the power 
of man. Then one goes into a store; one wanders 
through endles€ departments, on endless floors, one 
goes through tunnels and never comes out by the 
same block as one went in. There is so much in 
the streets; everything hurries — motor cars, street 
cars, railway cars. In the restaurants endless vistas 
of napery and crystal extend away. One goes up 
Broadway at night to see the crowded colored signs 
of the movie shows and the theaters twinkle and 
eddy, inviting, clamorous, Babylonian! You see, 
all the great cities of the present and the past come 
into my mind and make my judgment fantastic. 
For New York is all the cities. It is the giant city 
grouped about its colossal forest of parallelepipeds 
of concrete and steel. One can't find one's way. 
The plan of the city is simple, but it is so large 
and hangs so heavily over you that you become 
dazed. You can't find the news stand in the mar- 
ble lounge; the pages whom you sent on a message 
do not come back, but fade in the distance, grow 



156 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

old and die in a distant region, perchance to be 
buried under leaves. It is such a little thing, a 
page boy, in Brobdingnag! He is so much below 
scale. Such a scale ! They brought me a telephone 
message the first day. It comprised twenty-two 
words and was written on a sheet of paper three 
feet four inches long. Here indeed is the toy of a 
giant. It is only little by little, as you grow used 
to this enormity, that you reach comfort in New 
York, that you look casually at the Equitable 
Building, and contemptuously at the little apart- 
ment houses of eight floors. Also, you discover 
with relief that in New York any fool can find his 
way, unless he goes south of Washington Square. 
Later on, new troubles come, for one street looks 
like the other and you cannot remember numbers. 
It is only by degrees that streets acquire per- 
sonality in your mind. 

You come to know that on East Forty-second 
stands a railway station; that in Fourteenth Street 
you may buy "Louis-the-XIVth-Street furniture," 
as a New York nut has put it; that West Fortieth 
runs south of Bryant Square, while West Fifty- 
ninth marks the beginning of Central Park. 
Broadway worries you a lot. It is always turning 
up on the wrong side of the town; you resent its 
irregularity; you are becoming an American. 

Standing by the building plot between Vander- 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 157 

bilt and Park Avenues, and looking westward, you 
see a strange thing — an enormous office building 
against the back of which outHnes itself the spire of 
a church. A big office and a little church; what 
a change since the Middle Ages! And the little 
New York church is vigorously, resolutely Gothic. 
They nearly all are, in New York, as they are 
elsewhere. Even in Fifth Avenue, vast erections 
of stone are fretted into trefoil and cinquefoil, 
garnished with finials and gargoyles, spired and 
flying buttressed, as if Chartres and Canterbury 
had crossed the ocean. It is tragic. Nothing is 
more beautiful than the American grain elevator, 
and nothing seems so absurd as the American 
Gothic church. I know the English are just the 
same. They, too, erect Gothic churches; I have 
even seen a chapel made of galvanized iron fitted 
with an ogival window, but that is Europe, tradi- 
tional Old Europe, not modern America. 

One might have expected America to realize that 
Christianity existed before Gothic architecture, and 
that there is no association between the two. 
America might have escaped from the thrall. This 
mechanical, conventional, worn-out Gothic, how 
disgusting, how outrageous it is to see it go up 
to-day! What wooden feeling that reveals! What 
lack of freshness, lack of courage ! And to think 
that this rag doll of the ages should inhabit Brob- 



158 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

dingnag! that Gothic — this ecclesiastical ready-to- 
wear — should be accepted in the country which is 
to-day the sole possessor of a new architecture! 

In Europe architecture died in i860, when the 
great Georgian style had given way to the porticoes 
and columns of Victoria, and to the barracks of 
Baron Hausmann. Then creation ceased. Of late 
years the English history of architecture, particu- 
larly in domestic work, is a horrible orgy of mongrel 
Elizabethan and incoherent Renaissance; in Ger- 
many originality suffered delirium tremens in the 
suburbs of Munich, where one could see plump and 
peaceful German families taking their coffee in 
Chinese-pagoda villas. Then came America and 
ferro-concrete. America discovered the natural use 
of the new material, and she discovered height, 
Americans have often told me that I am wrong; 
they argue that the origin of the skyscraper is to be 
found in the small size of Manhattan and the cost 
of land. That is not true, for the skyscraper is not 
confined to Manhattan. You find it in Boston, 
Chicago, even in Oklahoma, where land was not 
worth a nickel a foot. The truth is that American 
architects, who went for their training to Paris, 
had the fit of exaltation which in other times pro- 
duced the great styles. That is how they made 
the style of the present, and it is magnificent. 
Some of the tall buildings are bad, some good. The 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 159 

architect has not everywhere equaled his dream, 
but in general he has all the time kept a firm hold 
on utility, the only safe companion for the man 
who builds. He has wasted no time and no money 
on the scrolls and garlands which disfigure English 
building; he has not broken up his noble columns 
with irrelevant stone cubes. He has used no col- 
umns at all except to support something. So far 
as possible (that is, after compromising with the 
demand for plate-glass ground floors), he has made 
honest use of his material. And so, by long lines, 
by avoiding fret, he has produced 'nobility. The 
Woolworth, the Wurlitzer, its neighbor the Bush 
Terminal — all these, though rather elaborate, are 
clean-lined and good. Lit up at night, the Bush 
Terminal is a fairy castle in the air. The Com- 
modore Hotel is perhaps the most magnificent of 
all because it is less narrow, has more dignity, and 
because its use of two materials is light and gay. 

You find them all over the town, these landmarks 
of the new builders. Sometimes, as in the case of 
the Flatiron, the failure is horrible. At other 
times the result is dull, but in the main they 
make New York into a city of columns which 
support the sky. They mean something in terms 
of aspiration. It is not business alone which piles 
brick upon brick so fast opposite my window that 
every week a complete floor is built. Business 



i6o HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

thinks that It hires the architect, just as It thinks 
that it tolerates the poet, but the architect and 
the poet know better. In matters of art they 
always come through. The business men are too 
busy to watch over their own version of beauty; 
so the artist comes In and Imposes his own. 

Height Is the new destination of American archi- 
tecture. Even In the distant suburbs of Manhat- 
tan — at High Bridge, for Instance — the twelve- 
floor building Is there, and the cottage Is not. The 
center of old respectable Manhattan can still be 
seen In Murray Hill, In Madison Avenue, but 
here, too, height will ultimately prevail. You are 
very conscious of this tendency in the Mayfair 
of Manhattan, round about East Sixtieth Street. 
The private houses are opulent, but their style is 
fretful and inferior to that of the office buildings. 
You can see that here money has toyed at leisure 
instead of wearying of design, as it has in Wall 
Street, and giving over the work to the architect. 
Here are marble medallions, unnecessary pillars, 
slim, wrought-iron gates. You can Imagine the 
rich woman who hunted the architect; you guess 
the husband away from home. Indulging in fren- 
zied finance. This feeling is continued in a less 
emphatic way In the district of Murray Hill, where 
the old predominates for a while. 

In general, the private house is excessive In de- 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD i6i 

sign. Here and there a white-stone face shines 
fine and pure, but few private buildings in New 
York are equal to the big apartment houses, such 
as those of Park Avenue and Madison Avenue, 
which are square and logical. The American builds 
best when he builds high, but he must go all the 
way. His occasional failures appear in the houses 
of four or five floors. The effect is not narrow 
enough for him. Height and narrowness are essen- 
tial to his new genius. It is curious to see the new 
products by the side of the old brick houses, col- 
ored with terra cotta, which, once upon a time, 
the rich people from downtown built near Thirty- 
fifth Street, to escape Manhattan. But Manhattan 
got them all the same. 

I wonder what would have happened to Man- 
hattan if the building law had not interfered; a 
time would have come when from the Battery to 
Forty-fifth Street the whole of the island would 
have been covered with thirty-story buildings. The 
lower floors would never have seen the sun, and 
great hurricanes would have blown from the East 
River to the Hudson through the devil's corridors. 
It would have been epic. Now the buildings are set 
back in their upper floors; it is still fine, because it 
is big, but it is losing the nobility of the sheer 
facade. The new laws have saved Old New York 
for better or for worse. Probably for worse, as 



i62 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

Old New York is an empty thing and the shade of 
Peter Stuyvesant a ghost out of place. But no 
doubt the old houses on West Twenty-third Street, 
near the ferry, the dignity of Murray Hill, and the 
disdain of Washington Square sniffing at Green- 
wich Village, will for a while be maintained. The 
little dancing places off Broadway, the few places 
where one may meet a few mild-looking ''toughs," 
will also long stand out against the vast and re- 
spectable pleasure halls of the democracy. 

I have wandered a great deal about New York. 
A city which had not its cosmopolitan population, 
and therefore its variety of impression, would be 
wearisome because the streets are so much alike, 
except a few of the main streets. You can always 
recognize Broadway, pursuing commerce and pleas- 
ure; Fifth Avenue, opulent and a little superior, 
just as you know where you are in St. Mark's 
Place, by the aristocratic old church; again in the 
pleasant, economical Bronx, in tumultuous Wall 
Street, you know where you are. But the difference 
between, shall we say. East Forty-sixth and East 
Forty-seventh is nothing. No unexpected angles, 
no London oddities of palace and hovel fix your 
eye. Differences of wealth alone make a differ- 
ence of impression, and these grade down so slowly, 
particularly in the eastern side of town, that the 
change of feeling is infinitesimal. 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 163 

To perceive a strong Impression In New York 
you must go to Greenwich Village or to the East 
Side. I did not go very much into Greenwich Vil- 
lage. I felt that it would be too similar in spirit to 
our English Chelsea. I was afraid to meet painters 
and writers, because all over the world they ex- 
hibit much the same vices, virtues, and views. 
They are international before they are national. 
The stockbroker is more significant. Still, I have 
known the admirable cooking of "The Good 
Intent," come within the radius of the Province- 
town Players, consumed coffee and ideas under the 
sinister glow of revolutionary candles in a room 
that had never been cleaned. Amusing. Amusing 
rather like the " Petit Trianon," where Marie An- 
toinette milked the cows and made butter. In 
Greenwich Village the decoration of art was too 
heavy for the art; I felt that what I saw there I 
did not really see, and that the real work was being 
done quietly elsewhere. 

It is very different on the East Side. The thing 
that strikes the foreigner first is that the New York 
poor live in houses externally of the same type as 
those of the middle class, the same height, same 
balconies; only the decoration of washing that 
hangs out to dry. The crowding children on the 
street and the fury of activity revealed by the shops 
located In cellars, by degrees impose themselves. 



i64 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

also the great number of fruit and vegetable stalls 
in the side streets. It sorts itself out by and by. 
One observes that among the twenty or thirty chil- 
dren on the doorsteps appears a variety of national 
types; one notices the mothers shawled and seated 
on those steps, talking, sewing, or watching without 
excitement the rows of babies in their little car- 
riages. One sees that here are no big stores, be- 
cause there are no big purses, and one is tempted to 
say that these tall tenements are not so gloomy 
as the low black houses of the London East End. 
The children make an impression of prosperity be- 
cause they are, on the whole, infinitely better kept 
and some of them better fed than the children of 
the English poor. 

The East Side carries itself off by a touch of the 
picturesque. Its division into national streets en- 
courages the stranger. He is surprised to find a 
Greek street, a Spanish street, a great block of 
Italian streets, but he is disappointed in China- 
town. Oh, what a come-down after the lyrical 
stories of the magazines! This little cluster about 
Doyer Street, Pell and Mott Streets, at the end of 
the Bowery; just a few signs in Chinese, a little 
pottery, some lychee, the Chinese Joss House, that 
is all. It is mercantile instead of being sinister. 
The opium den has removed uptown, and naught 
remains of the East save here and there a Chinese 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 165 

child, comic and touching in mauve-flannel trou- 
sers. One does not feel the poverty of the East 
Side, even when one enters the tenements. Here, 
indeed. New York is not outdistanced by London 
itself. They are horrible. Originally built for one 
family, the New York tenement now houses a 
dozen in a room; sexes herded together among the 
cooking, the laundry, and presumably ablutions; 
broken windows, leaky roofs, no plumbing, stairs 
thick with dirt and vermin. It would be tragic if 
I did not feel that in this great country that has 
work enough for all, the East Side is merely the 
clearing station of the New World. This man, who 
lives with two families in a room, is earning only 
enough to keep alive, but he is refusing himself 
liquor, movies, tobacco; his wet clothes dry on 
his body because he will not buy another suit; he 
is saving. Soon he will get a better job, will save 
some more, find a partner, set up for himself. He 
will move to 150th Street or so. He may succeed 
and, street by street, move downtown until he, or 
his son — it matters little — enters the charmed circle 
of Central Park. On the way many must fall, many 
must die, but very few stay. The East Side is a 
passage. The poor of America are not like those 
of Europe, locked into their poverty, whence they 
cannot escape except by incredible luck or amazing 

ability. In America, even the poor have a chance 

12 



1 66 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

with the future. They come, speaking strange 
tongues, without linen, sometimes without friends, 
but there is nothing that prevents them, no national 
bar, no class bar, from retaining the faculty by 
which man lives, which is hope. In America every 
man may rise. It is not an idle dream for an 
East Side child to tell himself that he will become 
one of the masters of America. It may not be a 
lofty dream; it means greed and grab, but it is a 
dream, and dreams are the stuff that worlds are 
made of. 

You can see them everywhere, fleeting in their 
large automobiles, and stopping from time to time 
to spend some money at a hotel, a shop. In New 
York they oppress you less than they do in London, 
because in America so many own automobiles. 
People mortgage their houses to buy automobiles. 
So it is not locomotion only indicates wealth, in a 
country where automobiles belong to a class which 
in Europe could not afford to ride in a taxi. Nor 
is it clothes. The man who has made his money 
in the West or the Southwest does not, when he 
appears in the lounge of a large hotel, make the 
effect, half smart, half vulgar, of the European 
nouveau riche. He buys his clothes in the town 
where he made his money; he breaks out now and 
then only through a diamond ring, bought in a fit 
of desire, and worn on a short, heavy finger. Also 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 167 

he dislikes dressing for dinner. It worries him. He 
would like to take his coat off, but his wife won't 
let him; on the other hand, he wishes that she 
would not take her clothes off, but he can't stop 
her. A common sight in the very expensive places 
of New York is a youngish, rough-looking man in 
a day suit, dining with a wife dressed in the Rue 
de la Paix, in clothes to which, sometimes, she 
adds the trimmings of Tipkinville. 

I remember such a couple. It was very late, at 
a show after the theater. I could see in the glow 
of his eyes, hear in the echo of his laugh, that he 
liked being up so late — so different from the night 
life of Tipkinville! As he could buy nothing to 
drink, he was having an enormous lot to eat. The 
pate de foie gras had been detained on the table, to 
keep ultimate company with one of those interest- 
ing sweets made out of an ice wrapped up in a hot 
omelet, which latter is inclosed in another ice, the 
result, I believe, in another omelet, and so on. I 
think he had ordered a cigar, and kept the box. I 
was a little sorry for him; how happy he would 
have been if he had been a ruminant with four 
digestive mechanisms instead of one. He lay back 
in his chair, extended thumbs in waistcoat holes; 
his intelligent brown eye inspected the room, as 
if he were valuing it. He was at ease. He was 
not afraid, as are the European nouveaux richeSy 



i68 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

of lacking good form. He was It. From time to 
time he glanced contentedly at his pleasant, 
healthy wife, who looked like an enormous rose 
trying to escape from a narrow green vase. She 
was not so comfortable. (Perhaps the green vase 
was tight.) She was peering through a gold lor- 
gnette studded with diamonds. She was looking 
round for somebody she knew, and she did not 
know anybody — yet. But as I observed them, so 
self-assured, I understood that they would know 
everybody — soon. They would take a house some- 
where near East Seventieth Street; buy the tapes- 
try ex-kings have to sell, a rock-crystal bath, and 
one of the beds Queen Elizabeth slept in. She 
would ride in Central Park, or wherever the quality 
rides. He would learn golf from this year's cham- 
pion. They would buy a larger car. They would 
join a country club, and there make themselves 
popular by taking down to the members cases of 
whisky. She would buy at sight in Fifth Avenue, 
having learned that she could not buy in Broad- 
way. He would be annoyed by not being admitted 
to an exclusive club, and henceforth respect only 
that one. He would do his work uncomfortably 
in New York, and from time to time dash down to 
Tipkinville, ostensibly to look after things, in re- 
ality for refreshment. She would accompany him 
only for a few days, in the fall and the spring. 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 169 

after her new frocks arrived. She would not need 
refreshment, for she would be quaffing the wine of 
life — lunch parties, tea parties, private perform- 
ances by Slovak violinists; Brazilian dancers and 
English lecturers would lead her to dress for lunch, 
dress for tea, dress for dinner; to pass from the 
midday band, inspired by Irving Berlin, and de- 
lightful, to the orchestra of the afternoon, inspired 
by Vincent d'lndy or Debussy, and praiseworthy, 
to the dinner band and more Irving Berlin, to 
the theater and fragments of "La Boheme," to 
supper and more Irving Berlin, to the midnight 
revel under the aegis of Mr. Ziegfeld, and, lest the 
dawn should catch her idle, to the dancing club, 
where, a little tired, but having his money's worth, 
the master of America (but not of his wife) would 
for a long time listen to Ruthenian - American 
music, and watch her, a little disquieted, revolving 
in the arms of a handsome young fellow with 
waxed hair. Then bed, perhaps to sleep, perchance 
to dream of the day, hurrying, similar to the last, 
upon the heels of the dying day. 

In other words, what Zola used to call ''La 
Curee^' of which there is no exact translation, ex- 
cept perhaps "pigs in clover." Only they are not 
pigs, but rather imitative sheep, full of desire, and 
lost in fields where grow strange grasses. 

This is the tragic side of the magnificent Amer- 



I70 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

ican desire, of the splendid American life force, 
which so swiftly has enslaved nature and raised a 
broad pasturage which no Attila can trample. And 
yet, in the middle of all this folly, America's energy 
and intelligence survive. The man Is still keen, 
the woman is still austere; they do not decay, 
but are only spectators in a play where they fancy 
they have a part. 

They do represent the triumph of the American 
mechanical civilization. You see that In their 
homes. One I have in mind is amazing. Imagine 
tall iron gates opened by flunkies uniformed In 
gold, whose business in life is to touch a button 
when the automobile of the master comes into 
sight. In response to that button, in the dim dis- 
tance of the expensive house, a bath begins to run; 
whisky and soda is set out; in the park in the court- 
yard the uniformed officials collect their flock from 
the private swimming bath and the private "gym." 
The apartments are fairly large, ranging from 
a dozen to thirty rooms. You can have an ad- 
dress there for twenty thousand dollars a year, 
though at that price you cannot expect to be 
really comfortable. 

I am not laughing at this luxury, exactly; it Is 
merely the extremity of the American character. 
The American is not understood in Europe, where 
they call him a dollar grabber. So he is, but he is 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 171 

seldom mean, even avaricious; he is also a dollar 
waster. He saves only when he needs capital to 
start in business. When he makes money he wants 
the fullness of life according to his particular lights, 
and one of his joys is immense hospitality. I have 
met many a hard American, but not one mean 
one; he is capable of fine gestures as he handles 
his wealth. In the main he devotes it to what one 
may call the mechanical civilization. 

There is no place in America where one obtains 
a fuller feeling of material aspiration than at the 
barber's. In Europe we get our hair cut; in 
America we linger for a moment on the threshold 
of the Mohammedan paradise. Here are whiteness, 
cleanliness, light. Here are thirty assistants in 
perfect white clothing. Here is asepsis as far as it 
can go; germicide soap for the barber's hands; 
sterilized brushes for the hair; sterilized brushes 
for the face. And after the shave! Scented oint- 
ments from the East; perfumed waters of recent 
origin, and the witch-hazel of tradition; hot cloths 
and hotter cloths. Forty lotions for the hair; 
shampoos soapy, or oily, or alcoholic; vibrators for 
face and scalp; tilting chairs to make a dentist 
jealous. You are scraped, and massaged, and 
rubbed, and washed; you feel smooth like a cat 
being stroked . . . and, to make complete the 



172 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

sensation of attendance, another hireling shines 
your boots into mirrors, while a houri holds your 
hands with rosy fingers and makes yours such as 
her own. Everything is done that can be done. 

It may seem churlish to remark that after all 
this you generally find that you have been given 
a bad shave and haircut, price two or three dollars, 
and that your large tip is received in a silence that 
means: "So that's the sort of piker you are! 
We'll remember you." That is the interesting part 
of it; the barber does not serve you well; as he 
works he hums a hymn of hate and ruffes your hair 
on purpose; he is rude, casual, and incompetent. 
You go to him for sensual satisfaction, and it is 
only the American sense of propriety prevents the 
manicure parlors being inclosed with curtains, as 
they are in the notoriously licentious British Isles. 

This Is part of the mechanical civilization, part 
of the desire to get all one can out of the New 
World. In a good English hotel you will sometimes 
find a theater-ticket office, a library, and even a 
railway-ticket office. There will be a news stand, 
a valet, and perhaps a florist; but no English hotel 
will supply you also with a candy store, a drug 
store, a notary public, a doctor, a safe deposit, a 
stockbroker, and an osteopath. An osteopath! 
Fancy a hotel thinking that there might be some- 
thing wrong with your bones ! In a minor summer 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 173 

hotel in New Hampshire a lady may be waved, 
which she will fail to achieve in a biggish Scotch 
resort. The psychological implication of this pro- 
fuseness seems to me double — the American wants 
to have everything, and he wants it when he wants 
it. In several hotels in America they have a 
night shift of stenographers. You can get out of 
bed at three in the morning; a cool, tidy girl will 
then take down your letters. You will say, "Who 
wants to dictate at three in the morning.?" No- 
body; but, in America, somebody might want to. 
That is the essence of mechanical civilization, to 
use everything you have, to reduce labor by ma- 
chinery and methods; and, by machinery and 
methods, to increase the further opportunities for 
labor. A scientific and productive ring, but it 
makes one rather giddy. There are amazing in- 
stances of its products, such as the typewriter that 
counts its own words, the machine that sorts index 
cards according to contents, the autotelewriter, 
which causes your handwriting to appear in another 
place while your hand is moving. Witchcraft ! 

I have enjoyed nothing more in America than 
the mechanical civilization. One finds it every- 
where. One finds a hint of it in the New York 
advertisements which offer to do your laundry for 
twelve cents a pound. (Shorten your shirts and 
keep down your laundry bill !) There is something 



174 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

fresh about that; there is something fresh in all the 
American devices. For instance, a shoeblack, 
after moistening my boots with liquid blacking, 
dried them with a small electric fan. I don't know 
that this dries them any quicker or any better 
than the wind, but I like the mechanical idea. I 
like, on railway platforms, to see little electric 
trucks carry the luggage, replacing men who shout 
and perspire. If this is excess, it is in the right 
direction — namely, toward the minimization of 
effort. The United States has done more in this 
way than all the other countries put together. For 
instance, the electric iron, price eight dollars or so, 
which is fitted to a light plug and enables the 
housewife to save its cost in a month by doing her 
own ironing. It also enables the poor girl, who has 
only one good skirt and two decent blouses, to 
remain smart. The iron is part of the American 
home, where I find other wonders — the linen chute, 
which saves the handling of linen and precipitates 
it into the linen room; the electric washer, that 
big drum in which you can leave your linen to 
swirl among soapsuds and think no more about it; 
the electric wringer, which saves you the trouble 
of squeezing the wet linen, and which is so deli- 
cate that you can intrust even lace to it. This 
civilization is extraordinary, and takes extraor- 
dinary forms, such as the electric curling iron; 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 175 

the immersion heater, which enables you to warm 
your coffee when you have no coffee pot, by dipping 
a stick of metal direct into the fluid; and even the 
safety comforter, which you can connect with a 
plug and lay upon any part of yourself which aches. 
Everything has been thought of. More people, in 
America, are thinking of how to make life easy 
than anywhere else. They will cut you a door key 
while you wait, just as they will build a floor of 
your office in a week; they will save your running 
downstairs, or taking the elevator, by providing 
a Cutler chute to mail your letters at your bedroom 
door. They will protect your shirts at the laundry 
by inserting boards and clips, and they will save 
you brown-paper parcels by providing laundry 
bags. They are always thinking of these things. 
For instance, when an American sells you an eye 
lotion, or a bottle of fountain-pen ink, somebody 
has thought of the use of these liquids, and, instead 
of making you buy a special instrument, or letting 
you forget it, has fixed a dropper to the cork. It 
looks like nothing, but it means easier living. Also 
it means saving labor. The plate washer, the 
rack sunken into soapsuds whirled electrically, is a 
clever machine. But what strikes one Is that the 
water is so hot that nobody need wipe the plates. 
They dry of themselves. The potato peeler, which 
rotates the vegetables on corundum powder and 



176 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

scrapes them clean, is a clever machine. But no 
one need clean the peel out; a stream of water 
carries it away. The whole idea of American busi- 
ness seems to be to save labor, which is expensive, 
and to substitute the cheap machine. 

I must note that America wastes paper and card- 
board in the most extraordinary way. Any Amer- 
ican newspaper would make twelve English ones, 
while the laundry board, the paper cups for ice 
water, all this is drawing on the raw materials of 
the earth. But America owns so much of the raw 
materials, and gets electricity for nothing. It is 
no wonder that she should substitute the machine 
for the human being. In spite of immigration 
America has never had too much human labor to 
spare. In the home, notably, labor is scarce; in- 
deed, the servant problem is one of the first things 
which impresses the European. It is a peculiar 
problem, for there are servants in America, but 
they are in a queer state of mind. The men are 
pretty fair, but the white women are intolerable. 
They are inefficient, unwilling, dirty workers, gen- 
erally rude, and seem to suffer under a sense of 
intolerable grievance because they are servants. 
They seem to think that to serve is to lose caste, 
which is to a certain extent true; in a family where 
one girl becomes a housemaid, and another a shop- 
girl, the shopgirl thinks more of herself, and 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 177 

makes her sister feel It. But what I cannot under- 
stand is that in a country where the opportunities 
for women are good, anybody should become a 
servant if he or she feels so violently against it. 
And they do feel violently against it. So much so 
that you seldom find a young housemaid; as a 
rule she is elderly, and is presumably a woman who 
has failed. Young ones are met mainly in hotels, 
because the tips are high. The waiters are just 
as bad. I like everybody in America except the 
barbers and the waiters. In these America pos- 
sesses a class of whom it cannot be said that they 
also serve; they merely stand and wait. 

All this points to suppressed furies. The re- 
sources of America are so vast, the exhibition of 
wealth is so intense, that those who are not rich 
seem burned up in a furnace of hatred and envy. 
All service, all subordination, revolts the American; 
the evidence of this is found in the prices paid for 
domestic labor. The European is amazed to find 
domestic servants paid sixty to eighty dollars a 
month, and unobtainable at that; to hear that a 
temporary lady's maid is being paid seven dollars 
a day, plus board and lodging. I do not say that 
they should not be well paid — indeed, eighty dol- 
lars a month is not too much for the servant's con- 
vicf life — but I do protest against the ill temper 
with which fair wages are received. 



178 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

The efifects of the servant problem are already 
felt in the American home. In the old sense, the 
American home is disappearing and is being con- 
verted from a house into a small apartment with 
a kitchenette, where the wife does most of the 
work, assisted once a week by a charwoman who 
earns three to four dollars a day. I discovered a 
number of cases which seem strange to an English- 
man, among women whose husbands were worth 
about ten thousand dollars a year. One of them 
runs a ten-roomed house and four children, and 
does all the cooking herself, assisted once a week 
by a charwoman. Another one struck, and went 
into a hotel, breaking up the home; two others do 
all the work of four rooms and the cooking. This 
is an uncomfortable stage in the transition between 
the old home and the new. My own belief is that 
the new home will appear in America first. It is 
already there, in the "efficiency buildings" — one 
room and a concealed bed, a restaurant below, 
a common nursery; in other words, everything 
handed over to the experts. I am wholly for the 
new type of home, believing it is folly to make 
every woman into a housekeeper, whether she be 
fit or not. But I cannot help seeing that the transi- 
tion stage is having annoying effects. 

In America the married woman Is enormously 
overworked. She practically works all the time, 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 179 

and this will have serious effects upon her culture. 
Before the war the American wife was greatly- 
given to intellectual interests. Nowadays, more 
and more, the care of the child and the house is 
driving her back into the housekeeping ranks from 
which she had escaped. Therefore, this is proving 
an impediment to marriage. It is becoming more 
and more an impossible proposition to ask a girl 
to give up the freedom of paid work to run a home. 
It is also a vigorous argument against a high birth 
rate; and, though I am of those who support birth 
control, I cannot help seeing that these overworked 
homes, and these apartment houses, where dogs 
are disliked and children forbidden, lead to mar- 
riages where there are no children at all — namely, 
to bad marriages. Again, the servant problem 
compels the husband to take up a portion of the 
housework, for which he is, as a rule, only more 
unsuitable than his wife. It depresses him still 
more than it depresses her. Lastly, it seems to me 
that, except among the rich, the servant problem 
is killing entertainment. The American woman is 
amazing. I have met a number who did all their 
own work and yet were perfectly waved and mani- 
cured, but it was not difficult to discern the nervous 
tension of the hostess as she watched her guests. 
I have seen one of them, with agony in her eyes, 
as she wondered how the hired porter was dishing 



i8o HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

up the food she had cooked. The American house- 
wife is clever. In America people cook food, while 
in England they cremate it; but what effort! what 
worry! what an oath those women must register 
that such a party shall never happen again! So, 
the mechanical civilization is not wholly creative; 
it is also remedial. If the Middle West uses agri- 
cultural machines instead of men, if the home is 
principally electric, it is because mankind is refus- 
ing any longer to be subject to mankind. That is 
good, but for the moment it is most uncomfortable. 
You will say that all this is very class-conscious, 
and that I am making a fuss about well-to-do 
women who have to work (serve them jolly well 
right!), while millions of American women have 
never had a servant at all. Well, I am not generally 
called a reactionary, and I am looking forward to 
mechanical homes for the poor also, who should 
not be so poor, who, too, should benefit from the 
mechanical civilization and from the expert. I 
want liberty and rest for the workingwoman, who 
to-day stands in the social system as if seized by 
an octopus; but I am not going to pretend that I 
view without anxiety the struggle for survival of 
the classes which have attained a level of culture 
and elegance that must serve as a standard for the 
rising masses. 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD i8i 

It Is late already, and It might be early still, so 
slightly has the day begun, such is the peace of 
this little town in Alabama. Above my head the 
sky is dimmed by a haze of heat. An idle wind 
stirs the dust into reluctant motion, then subsides. 
There is silence in the township, where only a stray 
dog wanders, seeking diversion or provender. It 
is Sunday morning, and no bells ring. I go along 
the irregular streets over the old cobbles outlined 
with grass. Sitting in their porches, large and 
content, are a few colored women, hands folded; 
the man of the house, for some reason not at church, 
stares meditatively at the hedge tangled with con- 
volvulus. From a distant garden I hear the 
chorus of a song. It comes, borne upon the slight 
wind, "Fo' de glory ob de Lord." This is the 
South. I have passed through the softly molded 
hills of Tennessee, seen the cotton burst its pods; 
all was ease and peace. Here, no more the rude 
comfort of the West, nor the glitter of New York, 
but a casual contentment which either fails to 
secure material goods or transcends them. I have 
a sense of cheerful poverty. Here one does not 
care. One keeps one's spirit calm and one's man- 
ners equal. Grace and weariness inform the voices 
of the women. 

I go along the tree-lined streets, which at a point 
cease to suggest the city, but mute themselves 

13 



1 82 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

into country lanes; past a few surviving houses of 
the Colonial days, low, white, and matured by 
neglect as well as time, until I reach the cabins 
of the negroes, where they live narrowly but gayly, 
cooking unexpected things and discarding tempo- 
rary griefs. 

Time passes. It is noon. In the main street 
the trolley cars establish fictitious activity. 

It is the afternoon, and the heat falls more 
heavily. Nearly all have fled the streets; they 
are hidden from the sun which strikes now with 
shafts of molten brass from the purple vault of 
the sky. 

A little coolness falls as the shadows lengthen. 
Near the soda fountains and news stands reviving 
youth seems to plot mild movement. The day be- 
gins to wane as a hesitation overwhelms the sun- 
set glow; a grayness gains and makes night. 

It is night now along the ragged hedges of the 
little Southern city. A blunted moon slowly passes 
from the color of a rose leaf to that of burnished 
copper. The tall woods of thin trees are spattered 
with the widowhood of the Michaelmas daisies and 
the scarlet patches of iris. The breeze is heavy in 
the thick leaves. The chorus of the locusts arises, 
that is like a breath through a split bamboo, 
blending with the broken carol of the cricket. 
All is soft and leisurely; upon a doubtful altar un- 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 183 

cynical content Is good-humoredly oflFered up " Fo' 
de glory ob de Lord." 

I love the South. I like the beat of life below 
Mason and Dixon's line. I like the negligent trot 
of the horses that no one hurries. Above all, I like 
the grace of Intercourse with this people of a civili- 
zation older, in a sense, than that of England, 
because they were cut off and so have preserved 
much that England has lost. The haste of London 
has not seized them, and yet they have resisted the 
dullness which befell the market towns of Kent. 
I like their voices; their words are gentle and vain; 
they do not question, nor comment; they respect 
your privacy, or, which is as good, do not care 
what hides within your privacy. A little languid, 
easily gay, never intrusive. They are the eternal 
aristocrats, whose strain from time to time blends 
with a coarser one, sometimes overwhelms it. 
Something of this hangs even about busy, indus- 
trial Atlanta or Birmingham. In despite of the 
growing commerce of the South, it accompanies one 
through Mississippi to New Orleans, and I per- 
ceived live memories of the Confederacy even in 
Texas. 

That which applies to the true South also reigns 
farther north, in Kansas, In little Evansville, warm, 
leisurely, and most charming. I found it in Wash- 
ington. Glowing Washington, near as it may be 



1 84 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

to the Line, is a Southern city. Indeed, to me, all 
of the country from Florida to Yonkers is the 
South rather than the East. New York itself is 
not a Northern city. It has not the hardness, and 
does not seem to suffer from the moral impulses 
which begin in Connecticut. It is gay and Oriental. 
Are not the South and the East everywhere much 
the same? 

/ I cannot believe that one can dislike Washington. 
To walk about the city is a continual pleasure, for 
it is a city in a park. Its broad streets lined with 
trees, the massive whiteness of its government 
offices, nothing of this is wealthy, but all of it is 
solid. It has an air of business, and when we re- 
member that the business of Washington is govern- 
ment, we understand that this business need not 
be very active. As at night you go to the Point, 
to stare into the deep sky shot with the weird 
greenish lights of the printing works that reflect 
into the Potomac, you discover always this South- 
ern peace, this soft protest against haste and 
acquisitive jiesire. And in Washington, for the 
1 first time m my life, in a misty garden I saw fireflies. 
That is the exterior, so pleasant, so sweet. And 
yet, as the European touches the South, he grows 
conscious that all is not so easy as it seems. In 
the Jim Crow states he discovers with a shock of 
surprise that special coaches on the railroads are 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 185 

reserved for the colored people, that they occupy 
only the three rear seats in street cars, and that 
in public places special waiting rooms are allocated 
to them. It gives him a shock if he comes from 
the North, where he has seen the negroes freely 
mixing with the whites, except in the restaurants. 
He receives a greater shock when he discovers that 
in America once black is always black, and that a 
remote drop of African blood running through a 
white vein can nuUify intellectual attainment and 
public esteem. 

It is very difficult for a European to understand 
the color problem; if he is not free-minded, he 
easily makes a mistake. I did not come to America 
with the traditional prejudices of the sentimental 
English, many of whom like to talk of the negro 
as a man and a brother. It is very easy to take up 
that attitude when you are English and never see 
a negro except in a music hall. It is quite another 
matter to maintain the same point of view when 
you live in a town where the black outnumber the 
white. This need not change your feelings as re- 
gards the colored man himself, but it must change 
your point of view in regard to the social problem 
he represents, 

I mean by this that one's personal liking or dis- 
like of the colored man need not influence one's 
attitude to the problem of the race. For my part, 



1 86 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

who during these months have spoken a good deal 
with negroes, I Hke them very much. Above all, 
I like their almost unfailing cheerfulness, the beau- 
tiful smile with which they greet the slightest cour- 
tesy or consideration. There is a jolly humanity 
about the colored man. When he serves you he 
does more than that; he takes care of you. He is 
sensuous and fatherly; he likes life, and wants you 
to like it, too. His taste for colors, his fondness of 
music, the lovely gurgle of laughter which you can 
draw from him with a slight pleasantry, all this 
appeals. There is something young in the colored 
race, and perhaps it is that which attracts. He 
does not seem to worry over social standing, ma- 
terial success, or career; he seems content, as Mr. 
Henry James would have said, "beautifully to be," 
to do his work, to marry some girl with a large, 
white smile, and teach his pickaninnies how to sing, 
"Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." Sometimes the 
innocence of the colored race produces delicious 
burlesque. Once, in a conversation with an enor- 
mous friendly fellow, who was minding a motor car 
which had broken down, and which he was trying 
to repair with unexpected tools, such as a cork- 
screw and a buttonhook, we came to talk politics. 
From interior we passed to international, and with 
immense seriousness he said to me, "Sir, can you 
indicate to me the concomitant circumstances 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 187 

which have caused the international difficulties in 
the circumference of Poland?" His eyes shone in 
their large whites; he looked solemn and proud as 
the long, round words came off his tongue, as if he 
took an almost sensual pleasure in their weight, if 
not in their meaning. I think that there I glimpsed 
half the charm of the colored race — its capacity to 
find a toy, whether banjo or verbosity. 

Of course there is another side. I have two 
memories of that other side, which is going to mean 
something in American policy. One of these was 
a full-blooded young negro, who was finishing his 
first year in a Northern university, and who in 
another three years would be a lawyer. He 
would follow his father in the same profession; he 
was keen-minded, and, even in conversation, suffi- 
ciently oratorical to assure me that he would make 
a fine pleader. He was to practice in New Jersey, 
where he would be briefed by men of his own race 
and by white men in native cases. He rather de- 
fined the problem to me without saying a word 
about it. Here was the African entering one of the 
chief professions of the white man, and entering 
it in spite of his color ... to do what.? to be 
what.? Always to be different; always apart, of 
the same class, not of the same kind. 

But the other memory is sharper, because it is 
more eloquent and contained in five sentences: I 



1 88 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

was watching the people who passed in the street, 
from a window where I sat with a negro preacher. 
He was concerned with his race, and so I could talk 
to him freely about the negro problem. After a 
while there passed, quite close to us, a girl who was 
probably a quadroon, rather pretty, not very dark. 
I had been talking of what was described to me as 
"the black peril.'* Suddenly the preacher pointed 
to the girl and said: "Whose daughter is that, do 
you think ? Do you think her male ancestors were 
black or white .? Be sure that that child comes from 
a stock where the women were black and the men 
white. People talk to you of the black peril. I 
say to you, what of the white peril .?'* 

I did not answer him. What do I know of these 
things.? All I am doing, in America, is to try to 
understand, and when on one side I find a white 
man laying down that as a social being the negro 
does not exist, when, on the other hand, I find a 
negro, here and there, burning with anger over 
social wrongs, all I can conclude as a free-minded 
man is that here lies one of the most serious prob- 
lems of the American community. America has 
two color questions — the negro and the Japanese — 
and it is all very well for the European to lay down 
what America ought to do or not to do about it; 
the European lives in another continent and has 
not those problems on his doorstep. There is a 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 189 

feeling In America that the colored element is 
politically a bad element; that it is ignorant, and 
generally corrupt. I do not suppose that this can 
be proved, because one never can prove that against 
thirteen millions of people, but the result of the 
attitude Is that a question which cannot be handled 
constitutionally has to be handled irregularly. 
Fearing the black vote, or intimately objecting to 
its being cast at all, it is quite clear that irregular 
methods are being used to prevent the negro from 
exercising the franchise. In The Nation of the 
6th of October, 1920, we find an extraordinary 
array of facts as to the treatment of black women 
voters, when they appeared to register. It seems 
that supplements were found to the ordinary legal 
device intended to deprive negroes of their vote, 
which consists in compelling them to show that 
their grandfather could read. (This means dis- 
franchisement, as the grandfather was a slave.) 
The Nation states that the law was stretched to 
keep the black women off the register; that diffi- 
cult legal questions were put to them; that they 
were asked, ''What is a mandamus?" That they 
were refused registration for failing to answer ques- 
tions on state finance, and even disfranchised for 
mispronouncing the word ''municipal." We know 
also that lynching is still considerably practiced, 
not only for sex crimes, but for theft, and even for 



I90 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

lesser reasons. We have read in the report of the 
subcommittee of the RepubHcan National Com- 
mittee on Policy and Platform that in 1919 seven- 
ty-seven negroes were lynched, as against only four 
whites and two Mexicans; that among the colored 
people lynched one was a woman, and that eleven 
were burned alive. 

We see all that, and if we are not free-minded 
we dismiss the situation by saying that the Amer- 
icans are dealing unjustly with a people who, after 
all, represent the fruits of American sin — namely, 
the results of slavery, just as Ireland is the spirit 
of English sin; a people who are not responsible 
for their presence in the United States. . . . Only 
they are present in the United States, and theo- 
retical humanitarianism can do nothing to remove 
what is a real difficulty. It is no use suggesting 
all sorts of legal measures if they are repulsive to 
public opinion. To-day American public opinion 
is not going to tolerate the idea of conjugal, or 
even social, relations between black men and white 
women. It Is not going to tolerate social inter- 
course in public places of refreshment and amuse- 
ment. It considers that the man of color Is inferior 
and must so stay. There are many reasons why 
this point of view should be held, and the European 
who does not sympathize with It is an ostrich. 
Which does not mean that this point of view can 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 191 

be maintained without friction. So long as the 
negro was either a slave or a man of very low 
earning power, he did not make a difficulty. But 
if we consider that, since the Civil War, the houses 
in possession of the negroes have passed from 
twelve thousand to six hundred thousand; the 
wealth they own, from twenty million dollars to 
eleven hundred million dollars; that in those days 
only 10 per cent could read and write, whereas 
now 80 per cent can do so; that negroes now op- 
erate insurance companies with assets of three and 
a half millions, and have sixty millions of policies 
in force; that there are seventy-two negro banks — 
one realizes that here is a movement made infi- 
nitely more serious by material wealth and educa- 
tional power. 

For the movement is not going to stop. The 
negro is acquiring pride. Whereas in the old days 
white blood was admired and a quadroon given 
the front pew in church, now colored opinion turns 
against the girl who consorts with a white man. 
The negro may be kept back publicly, but he can- 
not be kept back financially and commercially, 
because business knows no colors. While it is tru£ 
that the colored population does not increase very 
fast, because its heavy birth rate is balanced by a 
heavy death rate, particularly among half-breeds, 
it does increase. What is more serious is that its 



192 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

wealth per head increases still more than the heads 
themselves. Within fifty years America may have 
to count with a solid block of twenty-five million 
people, a great number of whom will belong to the 
bourgeoisie, and a few of whom will be millionaires. 
I have put this point to several Americans, and they 
have invariably answered: "It won't matter a 
bit; we don't care whether the negro is rich or 
poor. He's just a nigger. If he becomes a million- 
aire, he won't find anything to spend his money 
on." Which is all very well, but the people who 
so lightly wave away the question are overlooking 
the intense commercial competition which prevails 
in America, the fierce struggle for money at any 
cost, on any terms. Are we really to believe that 
when the colored race possesses a large buying 
power, the white entrepreneur will indefinitely re- 
fuse all this good money which wants to get into 
the theaters, into the restaurants, and even into 
the social life.? In one of his lighter sketches, 
Thackeray tells a story of a footman who made a 
fortune by speculating in railway stock. He an- 
nounced this to the baronet, his master, when 
giving notice . . . and Sir Thomas, perceiving 
that the money had bridged the social gulf, 
promptly shook James by the hand and said he 
would be glad of his acquaintance. Is it not pos- 
sible that when the negro comes into the fullness 



MEGAPOLIS SOUTHWARD 193 

of his power and his weahh there will be white 
people ready to kowtow to him because he is rich ? 
just as to-day they kowtow to other white men, 
overlook their extraction, if they happen to be 
rich. If they do, social life will grow immensely 
complicated. Collisions and race feeling are quite 
intense enough when the negro is poor; they will 
become violent when he is rich. 

The solution of this problem is a matter for 
Americans, just as is the Japanese problem. Amer- 
icans are perfectly entitled to refuse to admit the 
Japanese, and to treat their colored fellow citizens 
as directed by the majority. An Englishman is 
quite as entitled to have an opinion on this sub- 
ject as an American to have one on the Irish prob- 
lem; but an English solution of the problem is an 
impertinence; so I will merely suggest the three 
ways out which have been put to me by American 
citizens. One of them is a St. Bartholomew's Day. 
The second is complete social acceptance. The 
third is the creation of a free black republic in an 
African settlement. 

St. Bartholomew's Day is, of course, absurd be- 
cause it is impracticable; modern sentiment makes 
such a suggestion into a sinister joke. Social 
equality might come about in the course of cen- 
turies, but it is at present hardly conceivable that 
the prejudice will go down. As for the new negro 



194 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

republic, we have the experience of Liberia as a 
warning. Unless the American government is pre- 
pared to purchase a very large area, and to spend 
hundreds of millions in converting it into a modern 
country, the negroes would refuse to emigrate. 
Still, this sounds the most sensible of the three 
solutions, though it is a question whether America 
could do without her colored labor, which is becom- 
ing more and more skilled, and is fairly easily man- 
aged. I repeat that it would be an impertinence 
on my part to suggest to the Americans what they 
should do in this difficulty; but it is within my 
province to take note of the difficulty and to sug- 
gest to my hosts that here is a social problem so 
grave that, if it is not taken in hand in a purposeful 
manner, it will in time produce disturbances, ma- 
terial damage, and even bloodshed. 

It seems far away, this social question, as I go 
along the sleepy streets of the little city in Ala- 
bama. Here there is no problem, but only peace 
and a certain satisfaction. In the words of Mrs. 
Humphry Ward, life is here "a pleasant promenade 
between two eternities." But then, there is never 
much noise while the clouds gather for a storm. 



VI 

PARTHIAN SHOTS 

IN a way I gained my most vivid impression of 
America on returning to London. That city 
made America so remarkable and in some senses so 
desirable. I saw with a new vision the pageant of 
London, was struck by its blackness, the low build- 
ings, the deceptively broad streets. The English 
institutions came up afresh. To stay once more 
at a real English hotel (I tried three in eight 
days, and then gave in), to return to these places 
where one cannot buy a newspaper or cigar, where 
there is no telephone in your bedroom, or even hot 
water! That gives one an idea of the state of 
materialistic barbarism in which England still has 
her being! And to see with this fatal and, I trust, 
temporary, new vision, the average English girl, 
with her clothes straight from the rag bag, and 
her hair straight from the pillow, to compare her 
with the thousands of smart little persons, who 
look as If they were made of enameled metal, 
whom you can see any morning coming out of the 
Grand Central ... it was rather a shock! 



196 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

And, on the other hand, to be reabsorbed by the 
harmonious calm, the ancient poise of a country 
that finds more contentment in its past than in 
dreams of the future, to see once more in the eyes 
of women, after the hard brightness of Broadway, 
a glow which bespeaks tenderness and illusion, 
made one feel that America was hectic and exces- 
sive. But I think I have suggested that before. 
So it becomes difficult to sum up my emotions 
before the panorama which is modern America. 
Most things must be seen to be believed, but 
America is almost incredible, indescribable, irrecon- 
cilable with herself. I have seen a good deal of 
her, I suppose; I am tempted to an excursion into 
the guidebook, to say something of Pittsburgh, 
smoky, sullen; of Dayton, that little city so monu- 
mental for its size; of Columbus, spacious and 
gray, with its broad, pleasant, green streets and 
its occasional gift of silence; of Indianapolis, almost 
as spectacular in its layout as Washington; of little 
Evansville, so elderly and quiet by the broad Ohio 
that flows in sleepy calm; of Omaha, big, grim, 
and wedded to utility; and yet again of Chicago, 
savage Chicago, where during the short space of 
twenty-two months sixteen policemen were mur- 
dered on duty, vainglorious Chicago, where Mayor 
Thompson announces to the world on his posters: 
"Boost Chicago! We lead the world as a rail 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 197 

center! Forty-seven roads! A train a minute!" 
It is with reluctance that I part from Chicago and 
its mayor. They go together; Balzac would have 
been interested in them. 

As soon as you go West, leaving behind scraps 
of Boston, a few houses in Philadelphia, the green 
beauty of Washington, and jeweled Manhattan, 
you are in a country where the towns are all 
alike. In the center of a town, or in its suburbs, 
nothing will tell you whether you are in Ohio 
or in Iowa. You find the same quadrangular 
layout, the same houses, the same stores, lunch- 
ing places, and chapels. In the suburbs, the 
same timber bungalows. This is easily explained 
by the fact that most cities in the Middle West 
and West were founded within fifty years of one 
another by people who were moving westward, who 
naturally built the new cities in the image of those 
they were leaving behind. Moreover, these were 
not rich people, but pioneers struggling with every 
possible difficulty, limited materials, expensive 
labor, bad transport. They had no time for beauty; 
also they were immigrants from the East, among 
whom the aspiration to beauty, which vaguely 
informed the mind of the workman in the Gothic 
and even the Georgian period, did not exist; the 
aspiration to beauty is a thing which arises slowly 
among young dreamers, who are laughed at by 

14 



198 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

their families and their fellow townsmen, but who 
eventually have their own way. So the cities are 
unbeautiful, and only of late years, when wealth 
accumulated, has the aspiration to beauty begun 
to show itself in the shape of capitols and uni- 
versities. It is not always successful, but the spirit 
is there; the gray, uniform cities of America are 
merely the forerunners of a new architecture. 

But I do not want to discuss architecture. 
Deucalion flung stones to make men, but in 
America it is the men who have flung the stones, 
and perchance they will make gods. The Amer- 
ican child is to me a greater puzzle than the 
American adult. I cannot see how the emo- 
tional American, dominated by moral impulses, 
develops out of the shrewd and hard American 
child. It is almost inhuman. It hates to be fon- 
dled; it seldom kisses an adult; it wholly differs 
from the emotional, enthusiastic English child, 
which hurls itself upon the people it likes and in- 
flicts upon them sticky embraces. It does not give 
itself; it knows what it wants and takes it with 
strange brutality. If this applied only to the 
female children, I could understand it, for some- 
thing of this survives in the American girl, before 
marriage and misfortune have turned her into a 
human being; but the male American child shows 
only the hardness of the American man, not the 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 199 

gentleness and tenderness which make him so 
attractive. This may come from the close contact 
between the American child and its parents; it 
Hves with them, is of them; it is treated seriously; 
therefore, it does not look upon the adult as a god. 
Notably, in the well-to-do classes, there is no chil- 
dren's hour, say half past five, when the anxious 
prisoners of the nursery are allowed, trembling 
with excitement and with awe, to enter the holy 
presence of the grown-ups. It Is no fun being an 
American child; one grows up without Idols, and 
one must make some for oneself, since mankind at 
all ages lives only by error. 

The hard child suggests the hard home, which 
is characteristic of America. I visited many houses 
in the United States, and, except among the 
definitely rich, I found them rather uncomfortable. 
They felt bare, untenanted; they were too neat, 
too new; they indicated that the restaurant, the 
theater, the cinema were often visited; one missed 
the comfortable accumulation of broken screens, 
old fire Irons, and seven-year-old volumes of the 
Illustrated London News, which make up the dusty, 
frowsy feeling of home. The American house is 
not a place where one lives, but a place where one 
merely sleeps, eats, sits, works. You will say that 
makes up home life, but It does not; there is some- 
thing else, which can arise only out of a compound 



200 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

of dullness, boiled mutton, an ill-cut lawn, a dog, 
a cat, and some mice to keep the cat amused. I 
cannot explain it better than that, and Americans 
may not understand what I mean, although any 
English person will. Leaving aside the homes of 
the working class, which are much the same all 
the world over — viz., miserable spaces where a 
young wife is by poverty, child-bearing, and male 
neglect turned into an old woman by the time she 
is thirty, I suspect that what affects the American 
home is the scarcity of the slave class which Europe 
calls domestics. Human beings cannot make their 
own comfort; they are too lazy; if they are com- 
pelled to choose between a comfortable household 
of which they must do the work, and shop-gazing 
or cinema-going, they will seldom choose the home. 
All comfort depends on slavery, and the European 
domestic servant is a slave — perhaps well paid, 
perhaps well treated, perhaps even independent, 
but a slave, attendant upon the home of the master 
for one hundred and fifty-six hours a week out of 
one hundred and sixty-eight. America lacks that 
class; therefore, she has efficiency, but she has not 
comfort. Indeed, she has ceased to care for com- 
fort. You discover this particularly in the hos- 
pitals, of which I visited three. No attempt was 
made to procure flowers for the patients; there 
were no hand fans for fevered brows; the lights 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 201 

were not shaded to the eyes; in hot weather 
ventilation was bad unless the windows were kept 
open, which meant that the blinds flapped; the 
nurses were self-complacent and official; every- 
thing was well done technically; the surgery was 
audacious, the learning immense — but it was not 
comfortable. The American attitude is: "You are 
ill. We will dose you until you are well," just as, 
addressing a boiler: "You are out of order. We 
will overhaul your rivets and bolts." It makes one 
long for the European sister of charity. She is 
pathetically incompetent; her finger nails are not 
aseptic, but she can smile and stroke a headache 
away. 

Perhaps I was wrong to say that America has no 
slave domestic class. She has the married woman. 
In an earlier chapter I suggested that the American 
married woman is sweated. She is so, particularly 
on the farms, where she is sacrificed to the financial 
ambitions of her husband. Mark Leland Hill Odea 
has written a terrifying little play about that, where 
the farmer's wife is driven mad with hysteria be- 
cause her husband continues to put money into 
the farm; he leaves her to wear her old body out, 
cleaning and cooking, and on the anniversary of 
her wedding day refuses her a plate-washing ma- 
chine which shall spare her poor old hands; in- 
stead, he buys yet more agricultural plant that 



202 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

shall increase his fortune. Again, in the Pictorial 
Review of December, 1920, we find the tragic story 
of another farmer's wife who, after many years, 
inherits six hundred dollars, and for the first time 
has a chance to give her family Christmas pres- 
ents; her money is taken away by her husband, 
who with it buys six tombstones. I suppose 
that sort of thing happens in Europe too, but 
in Europe it is less shocking, because there most 
people are in need, whereas in America the farm- 
ers are not in need, but in a hysterical state of 
financial ambition. Some of those farmers might 
quite properly buy their wives tombstones on 
their wedding day. 

It is horrible and it is splendid. It Is part of the 
picture of the American energy which keeps the 
shops in the towns open till nine and ten o'clock 
at night, including Saturdays and in some cases 
Sundays. There is a fury of production and a fury 
of spending; there is an intoxication in the air 
which at first terrifies the stranger and soon influ- 
ences him. I felt it myself a few weeks after arriv- 
ing. I had never cared much for money before, 
holding my little European ideas of a comfortable 
life and pleasant conversation, but b}^ degrees, as 
I took contact with the Americans, those bersekers 
of commerce, I found myself wanting an automo- 
bile, like them, a big banking account, like them. 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 203 

and a bigger banking account, like them; I learned 
to smoke expensive cigars, like the Italian plate 
layers, and to say, ''It's only five dollars," instead 
of, "A guinea, that's a bit thick." Something gets 
into you; you grow discontented; you haven't 
got enough; you fight for it; you make harder 
bargains; in your armchair you don't think of 
vague things as your languid gaze follows the 
tobacco smoke, but, instead, you ask yourself, "I 
wonder whether by saying nothing and waiting a 
day I could squeeze another five hundred dollars 
out of that deal?" Competition and example seize 
the stranger; he falls to savage desire; his cupid- 
ity, his secretiveness, his resourcefulness — all that 
develops. In five months I felt how America forges 
and tempers the soft iron of Europe into chilled 
steel. 

This is not an attack; it is grudging admiration, 
for I confess that I took a certain pleasure in the 
struggling ferocity, the haste, the careless collec- 
tion of wealth which make up American life. Only 
one asks oneself. What is this leading to ^ America 
is so much in a state of formation that she has not 
yet acquired what I suppose one may call poise. 
She has no leisured class, the class which uncon- 
sciously and often in a hostile spirit promotes 
beauty by providing a market for the arts. The 
capitalistic class of America is beginning con- 



204 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

sciously to pursue beauty and to give its patronage 
to the arts, but if you search for beauty you seldom 
find it; it is a thing which happens, which flourishes 
in spite of difficulties. The beauty which you cap- 
ture grows domesticated; hke a tiger long impris- 
oned in a cage, it forgets how to spring. This 
applies also to the pursuit of culture, the impulse 
to knowledge, of which the American women's 
clubs are a magnificent example. The cultural im- 
pulse of America is still on the surface because 
it leaves the habits of the individual what they 
were. Culture is not knowledge, it is not informa- 
tion, it is not even good manners: Sir Pitt Craw- 
ley in Vanity Fair is drunken and boorish, but a 
gentleman all the same. True culture is one's 
father's culture more than one's own. It is not 
how one thinks that matters, but the way one 
lives, and, though America is thinking mucli more 
and more clearly than does Europe, she is still 
living in the middle-class way of i860. She is 
laying down the road to intellectual emancipation, 
but she has only just begun to travel it. Also the 
acquisitiveness of the pioneer is still struggling 
against the efflorescent culture of the universities. 
Every magazine is choked with advertisements of 
schools which teach salesmanship or train you to 
become a convincing business speaker. The appeal 
is generally monetary, and seldom cultural. Knowl- 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 205 

edge is being offered in terms of commercial power, 
not in terms of pure knowledge. 

I know that this prevails also in Europe, but It 
prevails in a different way; there is less ambition, 
less contest. There is more ease; something that 
one may describe as a static harmony of life. The 
difference cannot be better stated than it was to 
me by an American who said: "You will never 
understand us until you get this clear. If an 
Italian in Italy owns a successful hotel the only 
thing he will want is to go on running that hotel 
successfully, and when he dies to leave it to his 
son or his daughter's husband. But the American 
(or Italian-American) will be miserable unless by 
the time he is forty-five he controls two or three 
hotels; his son will look upon himself as a failure 
unless in the end he is president of a corporation 
controlling a chain of hotels from coast to coast." 
This seems to be ideally true, and it is easily ex- 
plained — democracy explains it to a certain extent; 
whereas in Europe, and particularly in England, 
the desire of an ambitious man is to bear a title, in 
America, where he cannot obtain a title, the only 
possible distinction is wealth. Therefore, he strug- 
gles for wealth as a European struggles for social 
recognition. But that is a minor cause, because the 
struggle for wealth in America is infinitely more 
savage than is in Europe the struggle for distinc- 



2o6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

tlon. There is something else, and that something 
is seldom taken into account. The true cause is 
found within the boundless resources of America. 
Fifty years ago most of America was untouched. 
Within a single century most of the coal, iron, 
and oil deposits, also the wheat fields, have been 
brought to bear. Most of the great fortunes are a 
couple of generations old; they were made easily, 
almost fortuitously. They were not made slowly 
and cautiously as they were in Europe by genera- 
tions which had time to grow used to being just 
a little richer than the generation before; great 
American fortunes arose like mushrooms, like colos- 
sal mushrooms which overhung the landscape. So 
the poorer pioneer said to himself: "Why should 
I not do what these others have done so quickly, 
so easily.? The resources are there." That is the 
point; in America the resources were there, while 
in Europe they were not. European resources were 
developed slowly, over about six hundred years; 
American resources were developed in a night. 
Thus the European learned that there was little 
room for his ambition and turned to easy living; 
the American learned that there was the widest 
room for the wildest ambition, and turned to the 
inflamed life. The American is no more desirous, 
no more ruthless, no more money-grubbing than 
any other kind of man; after all, he is merely any 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 207 

other kind of man. He is the creature of magnifi- 
cent circumstances, the child of endless oppor- 
tunity. He has, in a sense, inherited the world; 
it is natural that he should exploit his heritage. 

It is a platitude to say that one learns most 
about mankind in the police courts. It is also not 
quite a truth, for surely men do not lie quite as 
much outside as inside those courts; but one does 
learn something of the psychology of the nation. 
One learns it from the judges. Their way of 
doing things is the way in which people like them 
done. I have seen a number of cases tried, and 
nearly all yield a conclusion. Here are three. In 
the first a man was charged with indecency. In- 
stead of sending him to jail, the magistrate ascer- 
tained that he was sick, probably feeble-minded, 
so he sent him to the workhouse for observation. 
Also, he asked him what fine he could pay. The 
accused said fifty dollars, and finally confessed that 
he could raise a hundred dollars. The magistrate 
then fined him a hundred and fifty dollars, *'to 
force him to work." This seemed to me humane 
and burlesque. One likes the idea of fining a man 
only a figure which he can meet, but one discerns 
muddled thinking in finding a man sick, presumably 
irresponsible, and then fining him. What is inter- 
esting is the humane desire to discover by medical 
examination whether the prisoner was responsible. 



'2o8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

The second case was that of a motorist charged 
with having passed a street car on the wrong side. 
The magistrate put back the case, gave the pris- 
oner a copy of the traffic laws, told him to sit down 
and study them, and to come back for examination 
in two hours. If he failed in any answer he would 
be fined fifty dollars; if he was perfect, he would 
be let off with twenty dollars. This seems to me 
perfect justice, for it repairs while it punishes. 

The third case led to different conclusions. It 
was a matrimonial quarrel, where a wife charged 
her husband with assault; another couple was 
mixed up with the case. As I listened to them I 
felt that they were all liars. Perhaps they were. 
What was interesting was the behavior of the 
attorneys, who disputed loudly, unrebuked by the 
magistrate, and made pandemonium in the court. 
When the magistrate began to sum up against the 
defendant, his attorney had the audacity to inter- 
rupt . . . and the magistrate was weak enough 
to say he would go on with the case. A little later, 
the magistrate prepared to discharge the defendant. 
This was met by a violent protest from the plain- 
tiff's attorney . . . upon which the magistrate 
again resumed the hearing. Ultimately he dis- 
charged the defendant. Absolute Gilbert & Sulli- 
van; no Englishman could avoid being shocked by 
the complete contempt shown by everybody for 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 209 

the solemnities of the law. For a tithe of such con- 
duct the attorneys would have been turned out of 
an EngHsh court. I have seen this happen in sev- 
eral places. I have seen a state attorney address 
a witness while sprawling on a table. The judges 
never exact respect for themselves; they make 
their sittings into social parties; they seem weak, 
and it may be that they are too human. One of 
them has carried familiarity so far as to dice for 
the fine with the prisoner. (In Chicago; the pris- 
oner lost.) All this offends, but in reality it should 
not offend, as it means only that humanity has 
perhaps gone too far, except that it brings the law 
into contempt, makes the law uncertain. The weak 
judge who allows himself to be bullied into an 
acquittal is the same judge who would give a fif- 
teen years' sentence for a crime deserving twelve 
months. The weak are always the violent, and, in 
that sense, American justice is as liable to human 
excess as it is capable of human tenderness. But 
in the main it is informed by the sympathetic spirit 
which has led North Dakota to grant illegitimate 
children rights to the property of their father equal 
to that of his legitimate issue. 

A similar impression arises from institutions such 
as the Domestic Relations Court, which is pri- 
marily intended to settle as amicably as possible 
difficulties inside the family. It works in conjunc- 



2IO HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

tion with a department of social service, and han- 
dles the cases which the department cannot settle. 
And it handles them with the broad humanity 
which characterizes this side of America. For in- 
stance, I saw a case dealt with where a wife was 
demanding from her husband support which he 
refused on the plea that she insisted on making a 
home for her mother; the mother-in-law made 
trouble between them. The judge dealt with this 
case as a familiar friend. He first pointed out to 
the man that his mother-in-law was old and In 
need, and that somebody must take care of her; 
but he also suggested to the wife that her husband 
had the first right to the privacy of his home, and 
that she must take his needs into account as well 
as those of her mother. Finally, instead of sen- 
tencing the man to pay so much a week, and evict- 
ing the mother-in-law, which would have been the 
strict solution of the case, the judge sent the hus- 
band and wife to discuss his remarks In his cham- 
bers. They came out later with a treaty of peace; 
the man agreed to support, and his wife agreed to 
make arrangements with another member of the 
family to take In her mother. A little later the 
judge settled two cases of nonsupport of a wife by 
inducing the man to give the home another chance 
for a fortnight, and then to come to court again. 
In a similar case, where the man was out of work, 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 211 

the judge brought the parties together and under- 
took to provide a job for the man. The most 
impressive case, however, was that of a girl of fif- 
teen, feeble-minded and pregnant by a man who 
was willing to marry her. Instead of following the 
obvious wooden course, and letting the man off 
on condition that he married the girl, the judge 
decided that at the time she was unfit to marry, 
and that there was no point in upholding morals 
against eugenics. He therefore placed her under 
medical observation, intending to deal with her on 
the medical report alone. If she was proved feeble- 
minded, he would send her into a home, but he 
refused to be a party to the bringing forth of prob- 
ably imbecile children. All this seems to me 
admirable; it is more than human; it is sensible, 
and it represents the most enviable side of Amer- 
ican humanitarianism. 

One sees most of American humanity when one 
visits the remedial institutions. I saw two of these 
in St. Louis, one shameful, the other admirable. The 
first was the Children's House of Detention, a dirty, 
gloomy prison where the children are imprisoned 
until they are tried in their special court. I don't 
think they are happy. They are kept together and 
do not seem to fear the officials; they are examined 
and looked after physically — but the grayness of 
the place! The ugly tables and the poor food; the 



212 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mug of water and the piece of bread laid on the 
table without a plate ! This for children who have 
not been tried, and are therefore not guilty. That 
is a bad survival, and St. Louis has every reason 
to be ashamed of its house of detention. On the 
other hand, it is a piquant contrast to observe its 
treatment of the boys who have been found 
guilty. For them St. Louis has a farm, at Belle- 
fontaine, which exhibits none of the insensibility of 
the industrial schools of England. Here no prison 
bars, no watchmen, no measures against escape 
at night, except the removal of day clothes. A 
gifted superintendent has done a great deal to 
prevent the place from turning into an institution. 
There are no uniforms; the dining room is painted 
white, decorated with flowers, pictures, and flags. 
Three hours a day are given to school, four or five 
to agriculture, two to recreation within the bounds 
of the estate. The tragedy of Bellefontaine is that 
the boys stay there only six months to two years, 
and then go back to the bad old homes which made 
their crimes. It is to the honor of St. Louis that 
one regrets that its delinquent boys cannot up to 
manhood be kept in its institution. 

In other words, America is really trying to cure, 
to reform, and not merely to punish. You see this 
at its maximum in Sing Sing prison. As you travel 
along the lovely wooded hills of the Hudson you 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 213 

prepare for cells and gray gloom, but as you reach 
the prison you hear a band and you see men 
marching. Later you ask whether those men 
evolving in the large and tidy walled space were 
marching to dinner; you are told that they were 
marching more or less of their own accord, for 
exercise, behind the band they organize and man- 
age themselves. Then you discover that their uni- 
form is not entirely uniform; that they can wear 
part of their own clothes, have tobacco and daily 
papers sent in; that five times a month they may 
receive three visitors, making fifteen, and that they 
can talk to them in a large room, uninterrupted by 
officers, unseparated by the terrible grille of the 
past. You go into the workshops where they 
work an ordinary eight-hour day, making shoes, 
brushes, mattresses, or at printing, etc. There are 
no officers in the workshops; the convicts run their 
own discipline. In the dining room also no offi- 
cers, but again the men's own discipline. They 
may talk; they are not, as in England, treated as 
dumb brutes. You discover the prison club (the 
Mutual Welfare League), games, movie shows, a 
monthly paper that was edited, published, and 
printed within the prison under the editorship of Mr. 
C. E. Chapin, a prominent journalist, now serving a 
life sentence. You go round; you hear the warden 

address the prisoners personally; they reply with- 
in 



214 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

out fear or servility. Those who are not at work 
move about freely in the vast prison; others prac- 
tice baseball. The essence of Sing Sing is repre- 
sented by two mottoes — self-government and no 
officers. The idea is to thrust upon the convicts 
the maximum amount of personal responsibility, 
which prevents them from feeling outcast, and 
maintains their individuality for the time when 
they will return to the outer world. That is why 
there are no officers in the workshops, why the offi- 
cers are unarmed, while the prisoners freely handle 
piping and knives. They are trusted; they under- 
stand that they must go through with this, that 
escape is very difficult; so many are allowed com- 
parative freedom in the neighborhood of the prison 
under the languid supervision of a lonely guard. 
Breakaways are very few. I suppose the reaction- 
ary will say, "Very pretty; this means that you 
are treating criminals as honest men would like to 
be treated." That is absurd. Even in Sing Sing, 
model prison though it be, there is not much 
laughter; stone walls do make a prison, however 
much an enlightened civilization may try to pre- 
vent it. Before dismissing the humane effort of 
Sing Sing, the reactionary should ask himself 
whether he would like to lead the life of those men. 
It is a hard place, and behind the benevolence 
stand force, restraint, and a ready weapon. But 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 215 

all this Is hidden as well as may be, so that the 
convict may feel comparatively free, be given a 
chance to acquire the capacities of a trade, the 
powers of a free man, pending the time when he will 
regain the privileges of freedom. Sing Sing repre- 
sents one of the most beautiful sides of the Amer- 
ican character, the capacity of the strong man to 
understand the weak, the desire to give the weak 
man a fair deal, the desire to make him efficient 
again, to restore him to decency; in other words, 
to rescue an American from evil courses and to re- 
absorb him into the American community. 

After leaving Sing Sing I thought of the English 
prisons, of the periods of solitary confinement, 
where the convict sees no human face, hardly that 
of a warder; of the gangs on Dartmoor, watched 
by a guard with a rifle. I thought of our prisoners 
cut off for years from the activity of the world, and 
then tossed back to wander there like lost children, 
until they meet some one who entices them back to 
evil courses, because that is all the English prison 
has fitted them for. Then again I thought of the 
American prison, and was ashamed of my country. 

I wonder whether the fine institutions of Amer- 
ica are the work of politicians or whether they 
were imposed by an intelligent public opinion upon 
representatives who threw them as sops to local 
idealism. One cannot help contrasting those insti- 



2i6 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

tutions with the evil repute of the American poli- 
tician, and especially with the contempt which 
most Americans openly express for their governors. 
Perhaps the American politician is maligned; very 
likely he is corrupt, but maybe all politicians, taken 
in the mass, are corrupt. If you talk to an edu- 
cated Frenchman, Italian, Spaniard, or Portu- 
guese he will tell you that his politicians take 
bribes. The European papers contain as many 
scandals and exposures of people in high places as 
do the American papers. As for England, she 
seems very virtuous, and the superficial observer 
may think that the level of political morality is 
higher in England than anywhere else in the 
world. Only, when one begins to understand Eng- 
lish public life, one discovers that, as usual, every 
man has his price, and that whereas in most parts 
of the world you can get a man to do something 
mean by paying him a sum of money, in England 
you can bring him down to the vilest level by invit- 
ing him to lunch with a duke. And so there is 
little to choose between corruption by contract in 
the United States of America and corruption by 
snobbery in the home of ancient liberties which we 
call England. 

What is interesting in America, as opposed to 
England, is the common assumption that the poli- 
tician is a corruptionist. In many conversations 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 217 

with Americans I have been told stories which I 
refuse to reprint because they seem too wild. I 
have continually been told that the American law 
courts are corrupt, that many of the judges can be 
bought, and that where they cannot be bought 
political pressure can be put on them. I do not say 
this is true or untrue; I know nothing about it 
personally, but what interests me is the fact that 
America says these things openly, whereas the 
Englishman looks upon his Parliament as the abode 
of most of the virtues (he has been changing his 
mind since big business took over the British 
Empire, round about 191 7); also he becomes pain- 
fully sentimental when he talks of British justice. 
The American seems to have no illusions about the 
state; indeed, when one has read the American 
newspapers for a few months, and seen them filled 
with extraordinary tales of graft taken by high 
employees of corporations, by district attorneys, 
sanitary trustees, etc., one begins to believe that 
American rule is founded on graft; one has to 
reason with oneself to realize that the greatest and 
richest nation in the world cannot be erected on 
such a foundation. 

For my part, I suspect that the situation is 
actually this: most of the public officials are 
elected; therefore they have to truckle to local 
QDinion, for they hope to be re-elected. This must 



2i8 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

mean corrupt favoritism. In many cases, however, 
the situation Is worse because the pubHc official 
not only has to be re-elected by a body of constitu- 
ents, but he also is the nominee of either the 
Democratic or the Republican party. He will 
naturally cleave to his party; its managers will 
have influence upon him; If he does not satisfy 
them, he will not be renominated. It is too much 
to ask of a human being that he should resist an 
influence such as that. Lastly, the public official 
is, In America, very 111 paid; many state governors 
before the war received less than six thousand dol- 
lars, and their pay has not been raised commen- 
surately with the rise in the cost of living. If you 
compare rank with rank you will find that the 
American judge Is paid about a quarter of what the 
English judge receives, and this in a country 
where the cost of living is twice as high as in 
England. What Is the result ? It is not necessarily 
corruption. Indeed, the American judge deserves 
a tribute which he does not always receive for 
resisting corruption offered to poverty. I think it 
was Oscar Wilde who said that "anybody could be 
virtuous on ten thousand pounds a year." The 
most supreme of the American judges has never 
received such a salary, but he has been virtuous all 
the same. 

A more serious result is that in a civilization such 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 219 

as the American, where wealth absolutely pre- 
dominates, where a man's status is largely (though 
not entirely) defined by his fortune, the rewards 
of office are so small that public positions tend to 
attract only those men who would not otherwise 
make a very good living, or men who are already 
rich, and take office out of vanity. 

Nearly all the educated Americans I spoke to 
about this entirely agreed with me, but the subject 
did not excite them. Everybody acknowledged 
graft everywhere, with a way of suggesting, "It's 
a pity, but it can't be helped." I suspect that 
America does not worry about graft because she is 
a pioneer country, because she is still developing 
her immense resources, and especially because the 
opportunities are so vast that every man tells him- 
self that he has quite enough to do looking after his 
business without wasting time on the reform of 
the public services. He agrees that much time 
and money are wasted by corruption, but he figures 
out the situation and tells himself that the loss 
entailed on him personally is much less than the 
loss he would make if he were to devote time to 
public affairs. So he lets public affairs go, gets as 
rich as he can; often he harbors the private opinion 
that if he comes to a lawsuit the best thing he can 
do is to be rich. To be rich, he thinks, will serve 
him better than to be a little poorer and come 



220 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

before an entirely reliable court. I do not mean 
that he proposes to bribe the law, but he proposes 
by his wealth to avail himself of every delay, of 
every legal method, and to wear out his antagonist. 
To do that he must be rich; also he finds getting 
rich a more cheerful pursuit than purifying the 
public services. 

You see this political indifference more clearly 
still when you consider the treatment afforded to 
the Socialist party in America. One quite under- 
stands that during the war the American govern- 
ment should have dealt very vigorously with those 
who opposed its activities, who tried to impede 
recruiting, and in some cases plotted with the 
enemy. I take no sides in this matter, except so 
far as to say that the leaders of most of the Allies 
cannot escape their share of responsibility for the 
crime that is unjustly imputed to the Kaiser alone. 
I quite understand that when a government has 
gone to war it can hold only the opinion of Decatur, 
*'My country, right or wrong." But what is in- 
teresting is the indifference of public opinion to 
the treatment of the Socialists after the war. In 
the fear of revolution a great many things were 
done which did not accord with our conception of 
the habeas corpus. I have before me a photo- 
graph of a letter addressed to the editor of The 
Leader, Milwaukee, stamped October, 1920. Across 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 221 

the envelope is impressed, "Mail to this address 
undeHverable under Espionage Act." Therefore, 
nearly two years after the armistice, a newspaper 
is refused its mail because its views are disagreeable 
to the government! The letter is reproduced in 
the New York World, which very honorably pro- 
tests against this suppression of a normal public 
right, the delivery of correspondence. But I never 
heard club or private talk about this. This flagrant 
attack on citizen rights seemed to interest nobody. 
And here are a number of other cases which also 
occurred in October, 1920. At Mount Vernon the 
Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Miss Rose Schneider- 
mann, candidate for Senator, and Mr. Norman 
Thomas were arrested for attempting to read the 
Constitution of the United States and explaining 
the objects of the American Civil Liberties Union. 
This because they were speaking without a permit 
from the mayor, who had declined to give permits 
to speakers. On October 12th, at Norwich, Mrs. 
Glendowen Evans and Mr. Albert Boardman were 
arrested for speaking in breach of the orders of 
the mayor. In the same month Judge John C. 
Knox decided that membership of the Communist 
party was sufficient cause for deportation. (It is 
interesting to observe that Judge Anderson, at 
Boston, ruled the opposite.) Again, in the same 
month, at New York, the Socialists were denied 



222 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

the privilege of choosing poll clerks for election 
districts in which their party had polled the great- 
est or the next to greatest vote cast at the last elec- 
tion. All these cases are fairly startling, but most 
remarkable is that of the five Socialists, members 
of the New York Legislature, who in March, 1920, 
were excluded on the plea that they had been 
seditious. A minority, duly elected by the voters, 
was excluded by the majority. The five outlaws 
stood again, and in September, 1920, were all five 
again elected by their constituents. You would 
have thought that this settled the matter, since 
they were twice indorsed by the electorate, but 
the New York Legislature accepted two of the 
members and re-excluded three. This was not a 
party vote, for on the second occasion 73 Repub- 
licans and 17 Democrats voted for exclusion, while 
28 Republicans and 17 Democrats voted against. 

I submit that, coming two years after the war, 
this is a rather startling situation. It justifies one 
in suggesting that liberty of speech and of thought 
was brought very low during the four years of the 
Wilson administration; so far there is no definite 
guarantee that these liberties will be restored 
under the new government. This because no- 
body bothers about it. All the people who were 
arrested for expounding socialistic views were 
doing this openly, and in virtue of the rights 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 223 

that belong to all citizens in a free republic. I 
heard of no case where a Republican or Demo- 
cratic speaker was arrested; the Socialists were 
arrested because they wanted to alter the form of 
the State. But It Is perfectly legitimate to alter 
the form of the State if you don't like it; it is 
perfectly legitimate to try to convince your fel- 
low men that your views are right and that they 
should join with you in making them prevail. 
Supposing a party were to arise which wanted to 
make it compulsory on all of us to paint ourselves 
blue (basing this on the excellent historical prece- 
dent of Queen Boadlcea), you might think it silly, 
but all the same the pro-blues would be entitled to 
recruit members for their party. Any suppression 
of opinion is tyranny. In the particular case of 
the New York Legislature, which excluded the 
five Socialists, it is interesting to observe that the 
protests against this high - handed action soon 
died down. The exclusion did not form a topic 
for conversation at lunch; if it was referred to at 
all, the general attitude was that it served the 
Socialists jolly well right, and it was hoped that 
this would "learn" them to be Socialists. Which 
is all very well, but if we accept that a majority 
may deprive a minority of its constitutional rights, 
then no man will be safe — unless he belongs to the 
majority. If, owing to unfortunate idealism or 



224 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

lack of political suppleness, he happens to find 
himself in the minority, he will be in trouble. 
These suppressions and exclusions practiced by 
a capitalistic government absolutely parallel the 
action of the Bolsheviks in Moscow. The Bol- 
sheviks are charged with having disfranchised all 
the people who did not agree with them, and for 
that are severely attacked; the capitalistic parties 
of America in these particular cases have been doing 
just the same thing. They must not expect to 
be measured by a different rule. 

I am not making an impertinent comparison 
between the American and the British methods. 
It is true that England allows almost unlimited 
freedom of speech, printing, and meeting, and that 
has a beautiful air of liberalism, but I suspect that 
the English governing class, which is wholly cyn- 
ical and much more subtle than most people realize, 
has for a long time seen the advantage of letting 
people talk, and talk, and wear themselves away, 
and evaporate in talk. Where America represses, 
England swaddles. One of these days an English 
Prime Minister will try to smash the Socialist 
movement by offering peerages to the labor leaders 
and bishoprics to the Socialist clergymen. So I 
am not making a comparison; what I am observing 
is the psychological reaction of the American mind 
to this political tyranny. It is a simple one; 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 225 

America does not bother, and she may be unwise 
not to bother, for suppression drives these move- 
ments into secrecy. During the Russian revolu- 
tion of 1905 Pobiedonostzeff, a reactionary, said 
that an idea was more dangerous than dynamite; 
you can hide an Idea, but you cannot kill It, and 
all that the system of repression can do is just 
that, to hide the Idea. Reaction does not take the 
advice of Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who once said 
that you cannot stop a storm by sitting on the 
barometer. Reaction is to-day trying to sit on 
the barometer, and I suspect that this is more 
dangerous than hanging the barometer outside 
Westminster Abbey, while the plaudits of Eng- 
ish Liberalism resound. The American Commu- 
nist party, organized In September, 1919, worked 
openly until January, 1920, when a number of 
arrests were made; then the party became illegal 
and began to work underground. There, I feel, 
lies such danger to American political stability as 
may exist. Political repression has created secret 
societies; so long as they are secret, so long will 
they be dangerous. Revolutionary and violent sec- 
tions of the Socialist party never grow strong until 
repression forces them to work secretly, because 
the preaching of violence never rallies to their side 
anything but a small number of people. Violence 
is disagreeable to most of mankind because it Is 



226 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

risky. Man likes violence well enough, but he un- 
derstands that violence replies to violence; he is 
not prepared to face that side of it. Therefore, free 
speech leads to moderation, because moderation 
makes recruits; on the other hand, limit the free- 
dom of speech, you foster secrecy, sense of injury — 
above all, the romantic sense of outlawry; you 
produce groups of individuals who become more 
revolutionary because they feel outcast, who plot 
violence and more violence — because it is the 
dramatic thing to do. 

I found very few people in America who cared 
at all about these things. The political apathy of 
America is extraordinary. There is no care for 
abstract rights, but only for individual rights. For 
instance, after the presidential election in 1920, day 
by day — not only in New York, but in Indianapolis, 
in Chicago, in other places — I tried to discover the 
total votes polled by the Farmer Labor party and 
by the Socialists. It was almost impossible to find 
out; at first I was told that these polls were so 
negligible that they were not worth printing; in 
the end I discovered that the Socialists had polled 
just under a million votes, and that Mr. Upton 
Sinclair alone had received twenty thousand in 
California, but I had to take trouble to find out, 
and I never met anybody else who wanted to know. 
To this day I do not know how many votes Mr. 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 227 

Chrlstensen polled. Now a bright public opinion 
would want to know these things. Why it doesn't 
want to I am not certain. Perhaps it is the pre- 
vailing political cynicism which reigns in the coun- 
try, a cynicism which was summed up in an old 
English election song: 

If we put the muddlers out, 
We put worse muddlers in. 

Perhaps it is, as I have suggested before, that the 
American is much too busy with his personal 
affairs to trouble with those of the State, except, 
of course, as regards the cock fight of party against 
party. For it should be noted that when one 
charges the American with political apathy one 
must except the sporting side of the political con- 
tests. That is very definite. There is nothing 
apathetic in the way in which the white South votes 
Democrat because the negro votes Republican; 
in the disfranchisement of negroes by every kind 
of trick; in the Ku-Klux Klan proceedings. There 
is nothing languid in the loo-per-cent Americanism 
of the American Legion; nor in the anti-Catholic 
campaign of the "True Americans" in the South; 
nor in the keyhole activities, the witch-finding of 
the American Protective League. There is in 
America as much political violence as will keep 
even an Irishman busy, but it is a local, a sporting. 



228 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

a personal violence. It has nothing to do with 
general ideas. No doubt that is part of American 
regionalism, which has made the country as a 
whole so important and the State so slight in the 
mind of the citizens of what is less a great free 
republic than a great federation of free republics. 

Though this suggestion may arouse protest, I do 
not feel sure that in America a war against England 
would be unpopular. War in general has never 
been unpopular in America, though the inhabitants 
seem to hold the view that they are the most 
pacific of men. They are, so long as they get 
everything their own way, so long as their national 
honor, of which they are very jealous, is wholly 
respected, so long as they secure their position of 
international isolation, so long as the old continent 
keeps its hands off the new. The pacific record of 
the United States of America in the last century 
includes an expedition in Barbary, a war against 
England, a war against Mexico, a terrific civil war, 
a war against Spain. This record for a pacific 
nation is not at all bad. I do not suggest that 
Americans are born belligerents, but they might be 
if they were not so difficult to beat. 

No doubt a certain kind of American who reads 
these lines will laugh aloud, and will vow that 
nothing could bring into conflict two nations whose 
common blood and community of tradition, etc. — 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 229 

and all that kind of thing. I would point out to 
him three things. One is that there is to-day much 
less community of blood between England and 
America than there was between England and 
Germany; the second is that community of blood 
is no guarantee against strife — the spectacle of fam- 
ily life should prove that point; the third is that 
while it might have been true a hundred years 
ago to talk of community of tradition between 
America and England, to do so to-day is merely 
hypocrisy or ignorance. During my journey in 
America I met, especially in the East, many people 
who bore English or Scottish names, and whose 
families traced their pedigrees right back to the 
early Puritans or Virginians; I also met many 
who did not bother about their pedigree, who were 
still very British in feeling and culture. They 
were all very friendly to England, and all shocked 
by the idea of war. One can broadly say that 
cultured America is pro-British. Only — what does 
cultured America matter? What does cultured 
anything matter anywhere in a world where more 
and more the bank balance and the political caucus 
alone have voices.? As I went about, meeting 
these charming people, old Pennsylvanians, Bos- 
tonians, people of Vermont and Ohio, not many of 
them very rich, hardly any very active, most of 
them remote from New York and almost unaware 



16 



230 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

of Chicago, I could not help feeling that here I 
was meeting not America, but surviving America, 
an America which for two reasons has ceased to 
mean anything — one, that it has not got richer 
while the Middle West did; the other, that it has 
withdrawn from, or been pushed out of, politics. 

The divorce between culture and politics defines 
the Anglo-American danger. The old American 
families who made the Constitution have by de- 
grees been driven out of politics, because the great 
mass of Irish, Slav, German, and Scandinavian 
immigrants preferred their own people as political 
bosses. Corruption followed, and the old American 
families, instead of staying in the political field, 
drew their ladylike skirts away. Sometimes even 
now they make a feeble effort and stand for polit- 
ical office. As a rule, they are beaten by a recent 
O'Brien; they are beaten because they are not 
tackling the job. They seem to think it enough to 
put upon their poster a name from the Mayflower^ 
but they do not join the political clubs, do not 
enter the ward committees; they stay grand and 
aristocratic like the English country gentleman, 
and are surprised when they are not elected. The 
English country gentleman can afford to do that 
(though he will not long be able to afford to) 
because he is addressing Englishmen; the Amer- 
ican gentleman cannot do that because he is not 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 231 

addressing Americans. He is addressing a Euro- 
pean constituency as mixed as Constantinople; he 
is addressing poverty, ambition, religious strife, 
race hatred, resentment against the oppression of 
Kaiser and Tsar, diseases brought about by cen- 
turies of hunger; he is addressing everything ex- 
cept the broad comfort of Old America and its sim- 
ple rectitudes. Naturally he does not get in, and 
the control of politics falls to another type of man. 
What that type is matters only in so far as it is 
much more subservient to the electors than would 
be the gentleman of Connecticut or Carolina. 
Those electors — who are they.^' During the last 
half century America has admitted thirty million 
Europeans, of whom perhaps a sixth were English 
or Scotch. The great mass are Slav, Irish, or 
Italian. Those people have no links with England; 
their traditions are different, also their way of life, 
their religion, their literature. They are intelli- 
gent, commercially successful, but there lives in 
their heart no sentiment for the fatherland over the 
water. And among them, animating them, em- 
bodying the protest of Europe, are the Irish, ani- 
mated with hatred against England by all the 
injustice and oppression they have suffered at her 
hands, filled with memories of Protestant tyranny 
and irreconcilable with the beef eaters, because 
they themselves grew up on potatoes. The Irish 



232 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

serve as the cement of the immigrant nationalities; 
they bring the political aptitude, the faculty for 
organization, and the hate which binds men to- 
gether so much better than does love. That is 
what one must realize in considering political Amer- 
ica. The voting power has slipped away from the 
old Americans, and the new Americans are not 
Americans. 

I suppose I shall be told that America is capable 
of absorbing any man who enters, whether Syrian 
or Laplander. Regarding my first chapter on Bos- 
ton I received an indignant letter from a New- 
Englander in Chicago who told me that I did not 
know what I was talking about and that the old 
Puritan traditions had imposed themselves upon 
the immigrants. It made one laugh, coming from 
a town where nine women were murdered in one 
week, where bank messengers are held up in day- 
light, where moral scandals overflow from the hush 
cupboard into the newspapers. The truth is that 
up to a certain point America was capable of acting 
as a melting pot. But there is a limit to what a 
population can absorb, and though, no doubt, up 
to the middle of last century the old American 
stock was strong and numerous enough to absorb 
the immigrant, now the immigrant is the majority; 
by degrees it will absorb the American stock in- 
stead of being absorbed by it. You can see that 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 233 

in the foreign quarters of the American cities, 
where, block by block, the nation changes, where 
you find areas exclusively tenanted by, let us say, 
Italians, who have Imported their restaurants, 
their dishes, their kind of barber, their newspaper, 
their church. You see it still more in the public 
lists of marriages. You do not often find Carlo 
Ferrari marrying Bella Jones. Carlo Ferrari is 
marrying Maria Sorino. He is keeping up a purity 
of race which makes absorption impossible. When 
you reflect that immigration this year will prob- 
ably exceed American births, and that many of 
these births are foreign births, you will agree that 
the balance is tipped. 

In those populations you find a field where can 
grow hostility to any nation. Moreover, the ex- 
ploitation of hatred of England stands almost 
where it did in 1776. You see this come out 
in the most amazing ways. For instance, dur- 
ing the presidential election, the Farmer -Labor 
party had a committee room on Eighth Avenue, 
at 135th Street. Outside stood a poster which 
read, "Cox and Harding suit Wall Street and 
England. Do they suit you?" I interrogated 
a friend about this, and asked him how the 
Farmer-Labor party, practically a radical party, 
which must have some international leanings, 
could do such a thing. He replied: "Oh, don't 



234 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

you bother about that. They've got nothing 
against England, but it's always a good election 
card to play." I think that reply fatal. Is it any- 
thing but fatal to hear that in America thousands 
of votes can be secured if you "play the card" of 
hostility to England? And yet it is true. There 
we must leave it; there is no room for a convention 
leading to an entente cordiale, because there are no 
issues. Maybe President Harding's court of arbi- 
tration may do something to arrest the difficulties 
which may arise. Possibly the removal of the Irish 
question, which must inevitably come, may do 
something to change the atmosphere; but it is no 
use pretending that things are as they should be, 
for the awakening might be very unpleasant. 

The first time I asked an American what he 
thought of prohibition I chanced upon a stranger 
in that particular city who replied: "Oh, I'm for 
prohibition. Can you tell me where I can get a 
drink .?" This reply seems to embody a good deal of 
the public feeling in the matter. Apart from a few 
people who need their drink, and are exasperated by 
the difficulties they encounter, nearly everybody in 
America thinks prohibition a very good thing for 
other people. It should be said in justice that a 
good many agree that it is good for them, though 
they don't like it, and that they are willing to stand 
it. It is generally said that prohibition was brought 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 235 

about by political trickery, by the extension of a 
law instituted for war purposes, but that is not 
true. Prohibition is an old American institution 
which has been expanding by degrees, state by 
state, for a great many years. The war merely 
gave it the final impetus that enabled it to secure 
the necessary majority of two thirds, and there- 
fore Federal application. Prohibition might not 
have come about if a referendum had been taken, 
but as the American Constitution does not provide 
for a referendum, it must be held that prohibition 
has not succeeded in two thirds of the states with- 
out the assent of a more than sufficient majority. 
Many people believe that prohibition will not last 
long, and that America will eventually return to 
some sort of liquor consumption, probably by the 
p^tc sion of the Volstead Act — viz., by the raising 
of the quantity of alcohol in drinks to 3 or 4 per 
cent. They also believe that the enormous illegal 
traffic in liquor may bring prohibition into such 
contempt that it will die of itself. All this seems 
most unlikely, though liquor is obtainable in any 
quantity by anybody who can pay the price and 
who will take the trouble. For instance, in Boston, 
in October, 1920, in various hotels and bars, people 
were accosted by runners who offered to sell them 
drink; in the same city, in six and a half months, 
13,246 people were arrested for public drunkenness, 



236 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

and 213 had to be admitted to hospital for alcoholic 
excess. The cause of this is certainly prohibition. 
Whereas in the old days a man could buy a drink 
and leave the saloon, he now finds that difficult, 
but he can buy a bottle, take it home, and prob- 
ably drink most of it. Complete figures are not 
available, but it seems that during 1920 one of 
the results of prohibition was to decrease the 
number of people who drank moderately, and to 
drive a certain number of moderate drinkers into 
the drunken ranks. It has also resulted in the 
preparation of noxious beverages, made partly of 
whisky and partly of wood alcohol; it has brought 
about a great revival of home brewing and home 
distilling; at one time the demand for stills was so 
heavy that the industry had to set up a waiting 
list. It has, to a certain extent, encouraged smug- 
gling from Canada and Mexico. It has also created 
a class of enforcement agents, who are not numer- 
ous enough to do their work properly, and some 
of whom are necessarily corrupt. In other words, 
prohibition has left a great deal of room for eva- 
sion, and a great deal of evasion is going on now. 

By the side of evasion also go substitutes. One 
of them is supposed to be drugs, but I doubt 
whether this peril is as formidable as is made out. 
The whisky habit and the cocaine habit are very 
different things; the first is convivial, the second 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 237 

solitary. If the people who talk of the drug peril 
had any opportunity of coming Into contact with 
cocaine or morphia maniacs, they would know that 
the effect Is quite different. It is quite possible 
that a few drunkards have taken to cocaine be- 
cause they had to have something, but, so far as 
my observation goes, most of the people who 
drank moderately have taken to the soda fountain. 
Evasion of quite another kind is much more preva- 
lent, and that is the patent medicine containing 
alcohol. I have before me the labels of two of 
these patent medicines. One of them contains 25 
per cent of alcohol, the other 40 per cent; both 
are labeled to that effect. Now what Is interesting 
is that neither of these medicines Is designed for 
any specific disease; they are not supposed to do 
anything for you If you have rheumatism or fever. 
They are to be taken as a tonic if you feel tired, 
or depressed, and their pleasant taste is guaran- 
teed One cannot help being amused by that kind 
of thing. I took a dose of one of these medicines 
and found it very nice indeed. I felt very much 
better, and Inclined to take a second dose. And 
so on. 

As regards the results of prohibition, It is much 
too early to say anything precise. The wildest 
statements have been printed. For instance, in 
November, 1920, the superintendent of the Juvenile 



238 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

Protective Association read out statistics which 
seemed to show that cases of cruelty to wife and 
child had Increased 238 per cent since prohibition 
arrived; similar figures seem to show a rise in 
childish delinquency, in immorality. In disorderly 
houses. One can find similar figures which abso- 
lutely contradict the situation, and both sets are 
as childish one as the other. We shall know noth- 
ing of the effects of prohibition for twenty years, 
and then we shall judge only by figures. The 
psycho-sociologist knows that statistics are merely 
lies made respectable. My own belief is that In 
the United States of America liquor will practically 
disappear. Liquor is to a certain extent sustained 
by the unpalatable nature of the prohibition drinks; 
the beer is nothing but a ghost of the real beer; 
apple cider, loganberry juice, and such like are fit 
to make a school-treat sick. The only good pro- 
hibition drink is water. But the resources of in- 
dustrial chemistry will by degrees produce the illu- 
sion we need. It is the only thing we need in life. 
Drink itself will go because it is not being given to 
the young generation. That is not only a question 
of shame, but a question of supply. As the stocks 
go down, as enforcement grows more rigid, drink 
will grow more and more difficult to obtain. The 
father will naturally keep it for himself, and a vague 
sort of shame will prevent him from Introducing 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 239 

his son to liquor. So the young generation will 
grow up without it, not wanting what it does not 
know; by degrees, as the old drinking generation 
dies out, the only drunkards will be people afflicted 
by a new kind of depravity, who will drink whisky 
as they now snuff cocaine. They will be the excep- 
tion rather than the rule. Whether this result is 
desirable is another question; for my part, I have 
always held that the ideal state is the one where 
there are least laws. I should prefer to think that 
the saloon system could be moralized and made 
more aesthetic; that education could by degrees 
teach the population to use instead of abusing; 
and that drink could remain what it should be, a 
pleasure and not a vice. All this seems to be pos- 
sible, and on the whole I regret prohibition because 
it has done immense damage to conviviality. The 
entertainment of hard-worked people is difficult 
without the stimulus of drink. Prohibition din- 
ner parties are very dull; a dinner party, after all, 
consists in bringing together people who don't like 
one another much, and encouraging them to bear 
with one another; that is what is called society. 
It is difficult to do that on iced water; it is perhaps 
easier in America, where people are frank and con- 
fidential; in England the social consequences 
would be frightful. We have been asked in Eng- 
land to choose between Giles free and Giles sober. 



240 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

I hope we shall not have to choose between Giles 
sober and Giles sulky. 

In a sense, the prohibition problem is simpli- 
fied by the growing Slavification and Latinization 
of the United States. For psychological reasons of 
a complex nature, it is the Anglo-Teutonic and 
Scandinavian peoples who carry the taste for 
drink. The objections to immigration may be con- 
siderable, but drunkenness is not one of them; the 
Jewish immigrant is particularly free from the 
craving for drink. This does not mean that the 
immigration problem is in America not a serious 
one. That is to say, it is or is not a serious problem 
according to the point of view you may hold. The 
American who wants to preserve the Old America, 
the America of Alexander Hamilton and Robert E. 
Lee, must look with horror upon the central and 
eastern European masses; the American who is will- 
ing to see created an entirely new race should not be 
so greatly troubled. At present the old American 
still holds sway because of the sentimental sup- 
port of literature and the press. It is not won- 
derful that public opinion should be agitated about 
the immigrant, for the speed of immigration is 
going up at an enormous rate. In January, 1920, 
nearly 25,000 came in; in June nearly 50,000; in 
September 86,000. Also, we are told by the Com- 
missioner of Immigration that 10,000,000 of for- 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 241 

eigners are waiting for ships to America, among 
them 2,000,000 or 3,000,000 ItaHans. Commis- 
sioner WalHs goes on to say (December, 1920) that 
Ellis Island is now handling 30,000 immigrants a 
week. These are terrific figures, and confirmation 
comes from so many sides that there is no reason 
to doubt them. The famine which reigns in central 
Europe, the wars which devastate Poland, the 
political oppressions which reign in Russia, Bo- 
hemia, the Trentino, the ruin which has over 
whelmed Germany — all this is arrayed behind the 
immigrants in a drive of immense power. Living 
without security in a famished Europe, half of 
which has lost even hope, it is natural and inev- 
itable that their desires should turn, half in material 
aspiration, half in idealism, to the great Republic 
of the West, where there are wealth, ease, happi- 
ness — where at last they will be at rest. 

From the American point of view, however, the 
problem is not so easy. It is true that America 
wants labor, and America will continue to do so 
so long as she continues to develop her soil with 
the ferocious haste which characterizes her. Only 
what America needs is the agriculturist. She does 
not want more recruits for the overcrowded cities; 
the trouble is that the immigrants on the whole 
prefer to crowd the towns, and do not readily 
move toward Dakota and Idaho. There is, of 



242 HAIL, COLUMBIA! 

course, a powerful section of America which wants 
cheap city labor. All the sweat shops of America, 
particularly In the clothing trade, want to recruit 
humanity brought down to its lowest level of 
physical endurance, of human pride, something 
they can grind still finer, something that can just 
crawl enough to produce a profit. Those people 
will by Influence and money do all they can to keep 
the gates open, but It may be that they are getting 
more than is safe for them, and that the masses 
they are recruiting create a problem which defeats 
their aim. What will eventually be done concerns 
the Americans and does not concern me. All I 
may do Is to clarify the problem as I see It and to 
suggest to the American public that one of the two 
solutions imposes itself — either to restrict or ex- 
clude the Immigrant; by degrees to assimilate the 
resident foreigner Into the Anglo-American civili- 
zation; or to open the gates, to allow unrestricted 
immigration from any part of the world, and from 
these elements to compose a new race that will be a 
synthesis of all races. Both these ideals have their 
nobility; the second is perhaps the more attractive 
because it Is the more novel. One cannot help 
being curious of sociological experiments, and one 
would like to see the result of the fusion of all the 
peoples of the world about a new Tower of Babel. 
It might be rather hard on the Tower all the same ! 



PARTHIAN SHOTS 243 

As I come to the end of these impressions I wish 
they could have been conclusions, but five months 
in a country is not much, however broadly one may 
have traveled it, whatever labor one may have 
given to the understanding of many kinds of men. 
One is confronted with such diversity, such con- 
trasts, and especially such novelty. So I will let 
conclusions alone and say just this: I am too old 
to change. I could not with content migrate to 
America, there to live, to adjust myself to new 
attitudes, new laws and customs. I am too set, too 
European for that; a certain disabused geniality, 
which is the foundation of Europeanism, would 
suffer in the breeziness, the directness of America. 
But if I had to be born again, as I was born, of a 
family that had no influence worth anything, no 
money, no lineage — if I had to make my way 
again, as I had to, against difficulties such that at 
the age of twenty-five all I possessed was a hun- 
dred dollars of debts, well ... in spite of all 
temptations to belong to other nations I should 
have felt that there was only one place for a young 
man who wanted to tear from life full value for his 
efforts; in spite of all temptations I should have 
been born an American. 



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